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Follow TURFRegional Mobility Authority lobbyist, Brian Cassidy, also testified against the bill. These entities are using YOUR money to lobby against the taxpayer for higher, PERPETUAL taxation. These are UN-elected boards, so it's taxation without representation to begin with. No more Un-Constitutional, Robin Hood wealth re-distribution. Tolls need to come off these roads when they're paid off as was promised to voters when the systems were initially financed (in areas where voters actually got to vote on the initial toll projects, DFW & Houston. All other areas of the state have been denied a vote on their toll roads, and now un-elected bureaucrats and lobbyists are lobbying for perpetual debt and taxation!).
NTTA chairman opposes bill to require toll roads to become free roads once bonds are paid
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER - Transportation Writer -
Dallas Morning News
The chairman of the North Texas Tollway Authority told Texas senators Wednesday that a bill to eliminate permanent toll roads would stop highway-building in North Texas.
“Tolling is the only way we are getting any roads built at this point in time,” Victor Vandergriff told the Senate transportation committee. “Funding from the state of Texas is not available for roads.”
His testimony came as the committee considered a bill by Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, that would require toll roads to become free roads once their bonds had been paid off.
That would put a stop to so-called system financing, the standard method that NTTA uses to fund new roads.
By pledging revenues from its entire system, the agency can secure more money and better terms than it could if it tried to persuade lenders to give money based only on the projected revenues from a new road.
Throughout its history, NTTA has taken profits from one road and used them to support debt on a new road. In doing so, it does not have to wait to build a new road until the traffic it would generate is sufficient by itself to support construction and operations.
Vandergriff said the Ogden bill could put at risk billions of dollars in roads that are under way and billions more that are planned in the near future.
“It could also chill the bond markets,” he added.
Anti-toll advocates embraced the Ogden bill.
“This is my kind of bill,” said Terri Hall of Texas TURF, a grassroots organization that has been fighting toll roads, especially private toll roads. “We are totally opposed to system financing.”
Vandergriff admitted he agreed philosophically with the Ogden proposal. He recalled that his father, former Tarrant County Judge Tom Vandergriff, lobbied to create Texas’ first toll road in 1953 and, 24 years later, urged lawmakers to retire the tolls on what is now Interstate 30. He died Dec. 30.
“He spoke clearly about the dangers of tolling or system financing, and of his fears that it would be a drug that the state and Metroplex would continue” to rely on, Vandergriff said.
But he said passage of the bill would essentially stop road-building in North Texas, where nearly all major projects have been toll roads, many relying on system financing.
Hall noted that the Texas Constitution forbids “monopolies and perpetuities,” two words she said describe toll authorities.
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Link to article here.
Toll tax: Bill would make road charges perishable
Ben Wear: Getting There
Published: 9:41 p.m. Sunday, March 13, 2011
In Texas, tollways, like diamonds, are forever.
State Sen. Steve Ogden would prefer something a little less permanent.
Ogden, a College Station Republican whose district includes Williamson County, is carrying a bill this legislative session that would require tolls on any Texas turnpike to disappear once debt incurred to build that particular road has been paid back. The bill, as even Ogden admitted, has little chance of passing.
"There's too much money involved," said Ogden, who as Senate Finance Committee chairman is in charge of writing the state's $160 billion budget.
But the legislation's precarious prospects don't mean it isn't noteworthy. Ogden, through his bill, is addressing a broader, key question: When does a toll, instead of being a user fee, become merely a stealth tax?
Ogden said that time came in 2003 and he's as much to blame as anyone.
"Today is Ash Wednesday," Ogden said last week when he presented Senate Bill 363 to a committee, "and I'm here to atone for my sins. To make sure that the innocent don't pay for the guilty. And to make sure we have truth in taxation."
Ogden eight years ago was the Senate sponsor of a massive transportation bill that greatly expanded the power of the state and of local toll authorities to build turnpikes, charge tolls on them in perpetuity and use profits from one tollway to help build other roads, including, at least in theory, free roads.
None of this was an accident.
That legislation, carried in the House by then-state Rep. Mike Krusee, a Williamson County Republican and close ally of Gov. Rick Perry, was based on the premise that the Legislature had no taste for raising the state's 20-cents-a-gallon gas tax. Therefore, the only way going forward to pay for roads had to be tolls, with the excess revenue becoming an "economic engine" for expanding the transportation network. And toll charges, officials said, would continue even after each tollway's original cost had been paid off.
Time has borne out that premise about the state gas tax. The levy, last raised by lawmakers in 1991, remains 20 cents a gallon (there's an additional 18.4-cents-a-gallon federal gasoline tax), and toll roads have sprouted all over the eastern half of Texas.
The Austin area, which in 2003 had no tollways, now has five, and a sixth under construction.
Profits from one of those roads, 183-A in Cedar Park, will serve as what amounts to collateral when the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority attempts soon to borrow several hundred million dollars for the U.S. 290 East tollway in Northeast Austin.
Ogden says that's just wrong, that folks in Cedar Park are being "taxed" to pay for a road more than a dozen miles away that they will seldom use. Similarly, four of the Texas Department of Transportation's Austin-area tollways — Loop 1, Texas 45 North, Texas 45 Southeast and Texas 130 — function as a system, with their money pooled. The heavy traffic on Texas 45 North in Round Rock is basically propping up the much lighter use of Texas 130 near Mustang Ridge.
"We continue to run this state basically on hidden taxes," Ogden told that committee last week.
Ogden's bill, aside from snuffing tolls on a paid-off road, would not allow surplus revenue from one road to be used for another road.
Here's the problem, though: A toll road's costs don't end when its bonds are paid off.
There are still annual maintenance costs, the day-to-day expense of collecting and processing the tolls, and the big hit of major reconstruction every 40 years or so.
And another, larger problem: That stagnant gas tax will produce declining revenue as cars become more fuel-efficient, and what it generates now is already inadequate to build new roads and maintain the ones in place.
Ogden is carrying separate legislation, a potential constitutional amendment, that would allow the gas tax to rise by up to 5 cents a gallon. Each cent now raises about $150 million a year.
The extra gas tax money could be used to make debt payments for tollway bonds issued since 2003 (under that bill Ogden carried) — now about $270 million a year and likely to be nearly $410 million annually by 2013 — freeing up existing gas tax money to build or repair roads.
From road advocates' point of view, the worst-case scenario would be for Ogden's first bill to pass, making toll roads all but impossible to finance, and his second measure to die, meaning no extra gas taxes.
If neither becomes law — the most likely scenario — we get the status quo: taxes in sheep's clothing and, over time, increasing traffic congestion.
If any legislators are looking for something to give up for Lent, magical thinking about transportation finance might be a good candidate.
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Link to article here.
Senate considers bill to require tolls be removed once debts are paid; NTTA chairman says he's 'conflicted,' but insists NTTA must keep tolls on roads
Michael Lindenberger/Reporter -
Dallas Morning News
What if Texas required that every toll road become a free road once tollpayers pay enough to retire the debt required to build the road in the first place? After all that's what happened on Interstate 30, which began as tolled highway and became a free one 24 years later when the state removed the tolls.
On Wednesday, the Senate transportation committee took testimony on a bill by Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan, that would require toll roads to become free road once their bonds had paid off.
"This is my kind of bill," said Terri Hall of Texas TURF, a grassroots organization that has been fighting toll roads, and especially private toll roads, since at least the furor over the Trans Texas Corridor. "We are totally opposed to system financing."
There's a problem, however. The North Texas Tollway Authority was created with so-called system financing in mind. Typically, when it borrows to build a road, it pledges the whole system, which gives it access to more funds and better terms than would be available to it if tried to convince lenders to give it money based on only the projected revenues from the new road alone.
Throughout its history, NTTA has taken the profits off one road, and used to support debt on a new road. That way it needn't wait to build a new road until the traffic it would generate would be sufficient by itself to support its construction and operations.
To put it another way, both the SH 161 toll road in Dallas and Southwest Parkway in Tarrant County rely on system financing, as NTTA pledged revenues from its existing operations to boost the amount it could borrow on both projects. To win the SH 121 project, too, NTTA has to borrow about $5 billion -- an amount it could never have borrowed if it had pledged only the revenues it will collect on SH 121 itself. It instead pledged its whole system.
NTTA chairman Victor Vandergriff testified against the bill Wednesday, saying that it could put at risk billions of dollars in roads that are underway , and billions more that are planned in the near future.
"I agree philosophically with what Sen. Ogden has proposed," Vandergriff said, recalling that his father, former Tarrant County Judge and Arlington Mayor Tom Vandergriff, had lobbied to both create Texas's first toll road in 1953 and, 24 years later, lobbied lawmakers again to retire the tolls. He died Dec. 30 after enduring Alzheimer's disease.
"He spoke clearly about the dangers of tolling or system financing, and of his fears that it would be a drug that the state and Metroplex would continue to (rely on)," Vandergriff said. "Certainly in the fog of the last few years of his life, he never could forget that his son had become the chairman of the toll authority. It wasn't exactly the legacy he had wanted to leave."
But Vandergriff said Ogden's bill would essentially stop road-building in North Texas, where nearly all of the major projects have been toll roads, and many of them have relied on so-called system financing. "It could also chill the bond markets," he added.
"In the Metroplex, we have 102 miles under tolls and another 430 under construction. That's just what the NTTA is doing and if you can add managed lanes (built by the state and private partners) on top of that. We have been aggressive to move to meet transportation needs and fight congestion. Tolling is the only way we are getting any roads built at this point in time. Funding from the state of Texas is not available for roads."
From Hall's perspective, though, Vandergriff should listen to his father. She noted that the Texas constitution forbids "monopolies and perpetuities," two words she said describes toll authorities.