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Follow TURFAnother toll hike for DFW commuters
Link to article here.
The arrogance of this out of control un-elected toll authority is downright despicable. To say the authority "must keep charging more" and "it's either pay me now or pay me later" when there's high unemployment, high gas prices, and many people losing their homes and cars due to the downturn, now is certainly not the time for a tax increase. This is what happens when UN-elected bureaucrats make tax decisions. The NTTA doesn't have to answer to the taxpaying public who cannot pressure these people to lower tolls or keep toll taxes at reasonable rates. Their board doesn't even have to vote publicly for these tax increases as is required of other agencies, AND they can automatically increase tolls every two years from here on out without accountability or transparency of where this money is going.
Then to have some elected officials in Arlington advocating charging "market" rate tolls that would jack up the toll rates as high as people are willing to pay before they stop taking the road...These people are greedy, irresponsible, unaccountable scoundrels! Notice the reporter doesn't publish their names. Okay Arlington, find out who they are and make them pay political retribution!
The NTTA's statements affirm they're not interested in more customers (because that means a higher operation and maintenance cost), they actually want to shed customers so they can make more money on the schmucks stuck taking their toll roads.
"Without the toll rate hikes, which Davis said should pull in an extra $18 million to $20 million next year, NTTA would have to rely on increased traffic on its highways to keep its finances in line."
The article also states that the reason for the toll hikes are due to NTTA taking on new projects. Why should current customers pay to cover the costs of other new toll roads? According to testimony in the House Transportation Committee, there are no longer toll viable roads in Texas. They've all been built. Now they're raiding from every source of taxpayer money they can get their hands on to SUBSIDIZE LOSER toll projects they have no business building as a toll road.
“This allows us to take these rate increases in little pieces and avoid the massive 30 to 40 percent increases that we would have to impose otherwise whenever we decided to take on a new road,” Davis said.
The ol' stealing from Peter to pay Paul trick...he "independent" audit of the NTTA can't come fast enough!
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NTTA raising Dallas-area tolls 6 percent Friday
BY MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Dallas Morning News
28 June 2011
Drivers will spend more to use area toll roads beginning Friday.
Rates will creep up about 6 percent to 15.3 cents a mile, an amount that will mean nearly $40 more a year for toll-paying commuters who drive 10 miles each way to work and back.
The increase is unusual because it will take effect without any action by the North Texas Tollway Authority board, which voted 8-1 in 2009 to schedule automatic increases that will take place every two years forever, or until the board votes to end them.
Unlike Dallas Area Rapid Transit, which is required by federal law to hold hearings and to vote at least twice on a fare increase, NTTA can set rates as it chooses. In an interview last week, board member Bob Day, the lone dissenter in 2009, said he remains opposed to the increase — both on principle and because he thinks now is a bad time to ask drivers to pay more.
“I didn’t think we needed that large of an increase, and secondly the timing is wrong,” said Day, former mayor of Garland. “And third, I am basically against automatic increases.”
Despite Day’s opposition, there has been no discussion by his colleagues since to revisit the issue.
Tuesday, NTTA chief financial officer Janice Davis defended the increase as not just good for NTTA, but good for drivers’ pocketbooks, too.
“Looking at this strictly from the viewpoint of the drivers, this is really a ‘pay me now or pay me later’ situation,” Davis said.
NTTA owes about $8 billion to bondholders, almost of all which it has taken on since 2008, when it borrowed $5 billion to cover construction costs for the Sam Rayburn Tollway and the $3.2 billion it paid local governments in return for winning the right to collect tolls on that road.
Strong credit
Despite owing so much, NTTA has maintained strong credit ratings, partly because it has pledged to ensure its revenue remains at least 1.5 times as high as the payments it makes each year on its senior debt.
Davis said by deciding to schedule automatic increases, rather than ask the board or the public each time, the authority gains an additional advantage. It can guarantee creditors that the revenue will keep going up — even if traffic is flat — unless the board takes the unlikely step of acting to end the increases.
In turn, creditors reward NTTA with lower interest rates, Davis said.
She said that even without the scheduled increases, NTTA would still have to vote to raise its rates every few years, and probably by much larger amounts each time to enable it to finance the roads that local officials want it to build.
“This allows us to take these rate increases in little pieces and avoid the massive 30 to 40 percent increases that we would have to impose otherwise whenever we decided to take on a new road,” Davis said.
Day said he understands the business case for the automatic increases but said the benefits do not justify dealing the public out of the board’s rate-setting decisions.
“As a former mayor, I believe we’ve got to decide publicly every time we want to charge our customers more,” he said, noting that with a vote comes the opportunity for public input.
But Chairman Victor Vandergriff, in a statement explaining the increase earlier this month, said it’s a necessary step by NTTA “to maintain a viable financial system and to deliver the many mobility projects that bring growth to the North Texas region.”
What market will bear
Elected officials on the Regional Transportation Council in Arlington have urged NTTA for years to adopt a more aggressive rate policy.
The council wants NTTA to charge drivers like a private company would by setting rates closer to the maximum drivers would pay before they stopped using the toll roads.
That “market-rate” approach will soon be tested in its purest form on the managed lanes being built with regional council approval by private firms throughout North Texas, the first of which will open about 2015.
Those roads — including LBJ Freeway when improvements are complete in 2016 — will offer special lanes that will cost drivers several times what NTTA charges.
In return, those lanes will have a guaranteed minimum speed of 50 mph no matter how crowded the corridor becomes.
The increases will mean big money over time for NTTA, which already collects more money in tolls than DART does in sales taxes and fares combined from its 13 member cities.
This year, NTTA expects to collect $396 million in tolls. By 2024, toll receipts are expected to be $1 billion a year — 10 times the amount of sales taxes collected by DART this year across its member cities.
A surer route
Because NTTA’s annual debt payments are also expected to balloon in coming years — they will total $371.5 million by 2015 — the authority must keep collecting more revenue.
Without the toll rate hikes, which Davis said should pull in an extra $18 million to $20 million next year, NTTA would have to rely on increased traffic on its highways to keep its finances in line.
That would be an uncertain bet, because even though business has been good at NTTA, the combined effects of lingering unemployment, high gas prices and higher rates mean that traffic is likely to be lower in coming years than NTTA advisers had expected.