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Follow TURFEditorial: What if Perry signs toll road bill & no new funding comes?
Finally a prominent member of the press who gets it! This is going to hurt all of us and our already fragile, stretched-to-the-limit incomes and economy.
What if Perry signs the toll road bill but doesn't add transportation funding to the 'call'?
By Rodger Jones
Dallas Morning News
May 31, 2013
Gov. Rick Perry has a bill on his desk to open up more projects to what planners call comprehensive development agreements, for deals with private companies to build roads in return for tolling rights. It’s how LBJ is being built with the Spanish company Cintra as partner.
The bill, SB 1730, would allow CDAs for a slew of new projects statewide, including I-35 E/US 67 south of town, SH 114 in Dallas County, SH 183 in Dallas and Tarrant, Loop 12 from 183 to I-35E, and Loop 9 in Dallas and Ellis counties.
If you think tolls are everpresent now, just think about the highway map of the future.
I bring this up because as anyone knows in the metro area, taking toll roads to and from work every day add up to another major utility bill. It’s a big hit on the family’s wallet. The DMN’s Tom Benning wrote this morning about the next round of NTTA rate hikes and how the pennies add up.
The new CDSs probably will produce a new set of hybrid roads, like the new LBJ — a combination of free and toll lanes. The state is going this way because the Legislature has refused to come up with new sources of revenue to bridge the road-funding gap now estimated at $4 billion a year.
It’s a good bet that Perry signs the bill, since he’s been pushing in this direction for years, because the state can keep building roads and lawmakers can keep congratulating themselves about keeping taxes low. But the financing schemes inevitably mean borrowed private capital to get the work done — unless the private entities want to bring cash to the table, and why would they, with money so cheap? – and the public being drawn in to retire that debt with tolls put on our credit cards.
To me, CDAs add to the total transportation debt the public has been carrying.
So doesn’t Perry have an obligation, at the same time, to help lawmakers open up new, non-tolled, non-debt-related ways of filling the $4 billion hole. Perry should open the special session call to transportation revenue, if Senate leaders can hatch a deal with the House.