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It's more accurate to say the leadership of the Texas legislature refuses to fund roads or end gas tax diversions. At the end of the first special session, a key amendment offered by Rep. Linda Harper-Brown to dedicate the vehicle sales tax we already pay to roads passed by an overwhelming margin. This would have properly funded TxDOT with the money it needs to return to pay-as-you-go, but the LEADERSHIP in the Texas Senate, in particular Senate Finance Committee Chairman Tommy Williams, REFUSED to accept the bill with the amendment, so it was almost immediately removed.
Why the Texas House would so easily crater to the few in the Senate is beyond comprehension. No wonder they call it the 'upper' chamber when the House suffers from such an inferiority complex.
Editorial: Texas lawmakers’ stubborn refusal to pay for roads
July 2, 2013
Dallas Morning News
Longtime North Texans can regale you with the back-in-the-day wonder of tossing a quarter into a basket in Dallas for the privilege of driving a clean, modern, no-stop-light road all the way to Six Flags Over Texas, Arlington Stadium or even Fort Worth.
Those, indeed, were the days. And they are gone.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Turnpike became Interstate 30 and today is free, apart from the tax dollars to expand and maintain it. Toll baskets have disappeared, even as the number of pay highways in North Texas have multiplied. On those, a quarter won’t get you very far, a little more than a mile.
Times change, but what doesn’t is the need to keep up existing roads and build new ones, such as Sam Rayburn Tollway and Bush Turnpike. Without new tax dollars, that task mostly falls to the North Texas Tollway Authority, which must remain fiscally sound through current indebtedness and future projects.
This is why your toll charge went up Monday — by 5.9 percent to 16.2 cents per mile — and no one asked you about it. For that matter, your tolls go up again in two years and again two years after that, as far as the eye can see, thanks to a 2009 NTTA board vote that authorized the regular increases. Board chairman Kenneth Barr acknowledges that no customer likes it but asks you to consider NTTA’s perspective.
Small scheduled increases allow NTTA to pay off debt while maintaining a strong credit rating that keeps interest rates down. NTTA owes about $9.4 billion to bondholders for roads and has promised bondholders it will keep revenues at 1.5 times its debt payments, which officials say will rise to $540 million per year by 2019.
Sure, it could gamble on higher traffic instead of higher fees, but if that bet failed, toll customers would get stuck with even more dramatic — and unscheduled — increases. The bottom line is the bottom line: NTTA must cover debt plus 50 percent.
That gives toll customers two choices: Pay more every two years or stay off Dallas North Tollway, Sam Rayburn and Bush.
Oh, there’s another: Build more roads from tax dollars. Except that’s not really an option, when it’s a monumental struggle in Texas to dedicate the funding just to maintain current highways. As this newspaper has noted repeatedly, it’s a consequence of a Legislature that refuses to consider even modest increases to the gasoline tax or alternative funding solutions.
Even the bill awaiting passage in the second special session would account for less than a quarter of the known road-funding needs. So we’re stuck with more toll roads, a wish and a prayer.
If you want better answers, clearly they must come from someone other than your no-new-taxes-no-way state legislators.
By the numbers
$4 billion: Extra money needed each year to keep pace with highway maintenance and expansion needs
$400 million: Extra money provided by lawmakers to be shared statewide, about the cost of two freeway interchanges
$450 million: Extra money dedicated just to roads degraded by oil and gas drilling
$932 million: Extra money that would be generated for roads in fiscal 2016 through the proposed Senate joint resolution 2, which would tap oil and gas taxes
20 cents: Texas’ per-gallon motor fuels tax
9 million: New Texas residents since the state last increased its motor fuels tax, in 1991