TSA spies on Houston buses?

Big Sis Launches Undercover TSA Spies To Ride Houston Buses

Feds to watch for suspicious activity, pre-crime behavior

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, April 17, 2012

A new program in Houston will place undercover TSA agents and police officers on buses whose job it will be to perform bag searches, watch for “suspicious activity” and interrogate passengers in order to ‘curb crime and terrorism’.

Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee unveiled the program, labeled Bus Safe, during a press conference on Friday. According to a Metropolitan Transit Authority of Houston (METRO) press release, agencies involved in the scheme will, “ride buses, perform random bag checks, and conduct K-9 sweeps, as well as place uniformed and plainclothes officers at Transit Centers and rail platforms to detect, prevent and address latent criminal activity or behavior.”

“While local law enforcement agencies focus on overall safety measures noted above, representatives with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will also be on hand, lending their counter-terrorism expertise and support during the exercise,” states the press release.

“If you think you’re going to be a bad actor on buses, get ready. You are going to have a short-lived time frame,” Jackson Lee said during the press conference. The Congresswoman is a staunch advocate of the TSA, having recently chastised the passage of a new law that allows airports to evict TSA agents and replace them with private screeners by claiming it would lead to a new 9/11-style attack.
According to KPRC 2 News, METRO refused to disclose on what dates or bus routes the program would be operational. As well as TSA agents, police officers from the Harris County Constable’s Office Precinct 7 will be involved.

According to Phillip Levine of the Houston Free Thinkers blog, shortly after Lee gave her press conference the operation went straight into effect, with DHS and Metro Police officers questioning passengers who were exiting buses about their destinations and their reasons for riding the bus.

“When I arrived at Wheeler I got off the stage and instantly noticed the massive police presence. The police presence consisted of DHS, metro police, HPD, TSA, and Harris county police officers. They were going on to buses searching and stopping people for questions. Apparently Sheila Jackson Lee was there pushing for more security like what I was viewing. I asked the TSA agent if there was gonna be a bigger presence of metro or TSA. He said both,” Levine said in an email.

This is a wake-up call for Americans who had hoped to avoid being harassed by TSA agents by not using airports.

TSA agents are now being used to literally occupy America with an expansion of the 9,000 plus checkpoints that were already operational last year. 12 more TSA VIPR teams (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) will be added to the 25 who are already present at transportation hubs throughout the country.

Back in October we reported on how Tennessee’s Homeland Security Commissioner announced that a raft of new “security checkpoints” would be in place over the Halloween period to “keep roadways safe for trick-or-treaters”. Earlier that same month it was announced that Transportation Security Administration officials would be manning highway checkpoints in Tennessee targeting truck drivers.

TSA agents have been deployed to shake down Americans at everywhere from bus depots, to ferry terminals, to train stations, in one instance conducting pat downs of passengers, including children, who had already completed their journey when arriving in Savannah.

If the mass rollout of the TSA’s occupying army of minimum wage morons is not abated, Americans will have to get used to being interrogated, frisked and treated like criminals by TSA goons on a regular basis, meaning the United States’ transformation into a Soviet-style police state festooned with internal checkpoints will be complete.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Article printed from Infowars: http://www.infowars.com

URL to article: http://www.infowars.com/tsa-to-search-bags-question-passengers-on-houston-buses/

TxDOT tries to back away from non-toll plans on 281, 1604

Though is a HUGE victory to wrestle away 10 miles of toll lanes, carefully notice the word choice here. DFW officials were also promised a non-toll expansion of lanes next to the planned toll lanes on I-35E only to have TxDOT pull the rug out from under them. TxDOT later told them there wasn't enough money to do the non-toll expansion as promised so they'd be building the toll lanes first (the non-toll lanes would come later when, presumably, the funds dropped out of the sky). More background here. San Antonians beware!

Considering the Alamo RMA just got rejected for a federal bailout (known as a TIFIA loan), how do they anticipate securing enough funding to do either 281 or 1604 as a toll road anyway?

Funding identified for Loop 1604, U.S. 281

By Vianna Davila

Updated 12:03 a.m., Saturday, May 5, 2012

Transportation officials have nailed down a plan to pay for expressways on sections of U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 without tolls, but with a couple of twists.

The Loop 1604 portion would be just under seven miles, rather than the 12.5 miles originally planned. And toll lanes will likely one day run alongside the free ones on both highways, but drivers would have a choice of which lanes to use.

That's a marked change from previous toll plans in which the entire expressway would have been tolled.

It's unclear whether the toll lanes would be built at the same time as the free lanes and whether they would be elevated, though that is a possibility, said Leroy Alloway, director of community development for the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, the county's tolling agency.

The plan, presented Friday to a committee of city, county and transportation officials tasked with solving the funding puzzle, includes cost estimates for the projects, a mixture of funding sources that would be used to pay for them, and a proposal for how nontolled and tolled lanes might co-exist along the corridors.

The San Antonio Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization board will discuss the plan May 21 and vote at its meeting in June.


Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Funding-plan-for-Loop-1604-and-U-S-281-identified-3536328.php#ixzz1uFHjBLKR

DFW: Private toll project, I-35W, snags federal tax dollars


Link to article here.

So Texas lawmakers and Ft. Worth area elected officials expect ALL Americans' taxes to subsidize a privatized toll road deal, a public private partnership, that will charge ALL motorists AGAIN in toll taxes to actually use the road. Published toll rates are as high as 75 cents PER MILE! The deal also includes non-compete clauses that prohibit or penalize the expansion of surrounding free routes, profit guarantees, three-quarters of the project costs are public subsidies, and it represents eminent domain for private gain.

I-35W to be expanded north of downtown after project wins funding

Posted Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2012

By Gordon Dickson

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

By 2018, motorists will likely be driving on a rebuilt Interstate 35W, one with a combination of toll and free lanes, after the long-delayed project qualified Tuesday for a substantial federal loan that will pay for about 25 percent of its cost.

Although some motorists won't like paying tolls, area officials were elated to hear the Transportation Department's announcement that the project is eligible for a $415 million loan. They say that using a combination of free and toll lanes, which generate revenue to offset construction costs, was the only way to ensure that the project north of downtown Fort Worth could be under construction within 10 years.

"It's the first time I can say with certainty this project will be delivered," said Texas Transportation Commission member Bill Meadows of Fort Worth.

The work could begin in less than a year, and the rebuilt existing lanes and new toll lanes will likely be open by 2018, officials said.

The loan money, along with $150 million-plus in state funding the Texas Transportation Commission is expected to pitch in later this week, is the final funding piece for the estimated $1.63 billion project. The loan will be repaid with proceeds from the managed toll lanes in the corridor.

Managed toll lanes allow motorists to buy their way out of congestion. Motorists could continue to use the free lanes, which would likely handle traffic much better because of improved design, or hop on the toll lanes for a guaranteed fast trip. But there's a trade-off -- the rates on the managed toll lanes would vary with traffic, and during peak times could theoretically reach 75 cents per mile.

A contracting goliath

The plan calls for rebuilding lanes and adding four -- two toll lanes in each direction -- from Interstate 30 near downtown Fort Worth to North Tarrant Parkway, north of the U.S. 287 split. The split, also known as the Decatur Cutoff, would also be rebuilt.

The I-35W expansion will become part of the North Tarrant Express project, which is under way on Loop 820 and Texas 121/183 in Northeast Tarrant County, Texas Department of Transportation officials say.

North Tarrant Express, already a $2.5 billion project, will grow to a $4.1 billion-plus contracting goliath. The project is managed by a group of private developers known as NTE Mobility Partners, whose lead agency is Cintra, a well-known Spanish toll road developer with a U.S. headquarters in Austin.

NTE Mobility Partners and the state Transportation Department will enter into a new financial contract to add the I-35W piece, Meadows said.

Special loan program

The loan will be part of the federal government's Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act program, also known as TIFIA, which allows loans for transportation improvements to be paid back with favorable interest rates and over longer times than other forms of debt. Projects are selected partly based on the overall economic benefits to a region and ability to connect residents to jobs.

In the case of I-35W, that means connecting downtown Fort Worth with the Alliance Airport area on the city's far north side while providing better access for residents of Northeast Tarrant County.

"A little TIFIA goes a long way for communities that use these loans to leverage additional funding so they can tackle the big picture transportation projects this country needs," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement.

The I-35W project was one of five selected nationwide for such a loan, and the dollar amount represents nearly a third of the $1.5 billion set aside for the entire program, he said.

"TIFIA can help move projects forward, which will create jobs and strengthen the economy," Federal Highway Administrator Victor Mendez said. "Given current fiscal constraints, the program provides an invaluable opportunity for states and localities to leverage limited resources."

Feds dole out taxpayer money, TIFIA loans, for private toll road


Link to article here.

Also worthy of noting are the projects rejected, among them, tolled managed lanes added to Loop 1604 in San Antonio!

Toll projects get four of five short list places for TIFIA credit assistance

By Peter Samuel, Toll Road News
April 27, 2012
 
Four out of five projects advancing for USDOT TIFIA loan assistance are toll projects. The toll projects invited to apply are (1) the VA/I-95 HOT Lanes (2) North Tarrant Express 3a & 3b (3) CA91 Express Lanes Improvement Riverside Co and (4) the CO/US36 Phase 2. The only untolled project invited to make the formal application is the Gerald Desmond Bridge at the Port of Long Beach CA.

The statement today: "The projects invited to apply are well aligned with the TIFIA statutory selection criteria. The invitation to apply does not guarantee that the project will receive assistance. The Department will evaluate each project to determine its creditworthiness and negotiate acceptable terms for providing credit support."

Biggest surprise is Gerald Desmond Bridge - no tolls

The most surprising recipient is the Gerald Desmond Bridge which has no identifiable revenue stream to support $500m of loans being taken out to support it. And nothing but the dubious financial condition of the state of California to back it!

The Gerald Desmond Bridge is a $950m 6-lane cable stayed bridge at the port of Long Beach that is designed to replace a 1968 4-lane thru-arch truss bridge. As in the case of the Bayonne Bridge NY the old bridge deck is 160ft, 48m over the water - too low to accommodate the largest new container ships, so the replacement span deck will be over 200ft, 63m high. The Desmond bridge carries an average 68k vehicles/day (18m/yr) which 6 lanes will accommodate more comfortably. The bridge has a main span of 415ft, 120m.

Located at the end of I-710 it is a link in a 4-mile, 7km east-west expressway standard route between Long Beach through Terminal Island, heart of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach - and San Pedro at the southern end of I-110. The Vincent Thomas Bridge carries the route over the western channel to the ports.

Together the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are by far the largest container port in the United States and generate major freight rail and truck traffic north up I-110 and I-710.

Of interest are the projects the Feds are declining to grant TIFIA credit assistance at this time:

- Loop1604 San Antonio

- TX550 Cameron Co TX

- MoPac Austin TX

- Dominion Blvd, Chesapeake VA

- Streetcars, Kansas City MO

- DART orange rail Dallas TX

- DE/US301

- FL/I-75 HOT Lanes Broward Co

- Gold Line metro LA, CA

- Ohio River Bridges Louisville KY/IN

- Knik Arm Bridge, Alaska

- Dulles Rail, northern VA

-Tappan Zee Bridge, NY State Thruway

- Garden Parkway Gaston Connector, Charlottte NC

- Mid Currituck Bridge, Outer Banks NC

- TX/I-35E HOT lanes Dallas TX

- Pod Train,  San Diego CA

- Otay Mesa interchange San Diego CA

- CA85 HOT lanes Santa Clara Co CA

- Columbia River Bridges WA

The 26 letters of interest sought over $13b in federal credit assistance under TIFIA for projects costing $36b.

The five selected in a kind of short-listing involve projects costing $4,872m and request credit assistance of $1,625m.

TIFIA assistance includes direct loans on better terms than available in the market, conditions of the loans that carry heavy risk and relieve other investors of risk, and various kinds of assurance of backing.

Because demand for the TIFIA loans exceeds money available the USDOT is doing sequential solicitations. Projects not invited in one round to go forward can reapply in future solicitations.

VA/I-95 HOTL:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2012/dot4412d.html

N Tarrant Dallas TX:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2012/dot4412e.html

Gerald Desmond Bridge Long Beach CA:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2012/dot4412a.html

CA91XLs extension:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2012/dot4412b.html

CO36 toll lanes/BRT:

http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2012/dot4412c.html

news release

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/tifia/news/#five%22

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ipd/tifia/letters_interest_applications/letters_...

COMMENT: something rotten is going on with the short-listing of the Gerald Desmond Bridge ahead of a bunch of toll projects. That bridge has no identified income stream to support its debt. Over half its debt will be funded by "state highway and transportation bonds." And this is a project that absolutely could have been financed with tolls. Traffic on its four lanes averages 68k/day - Detroit DRIC enthusiasts note that number - and at $950m the cost of the 6-lane replacement is reasonable. The failure to toll such a project is a reminder of California as Lala Land.

TOLLROADSnews 2012-04-26

Who are the tollers in the Texas primary?

What a time to be a Texan! This year we have MANY hotly contested primary races and an opportunity to THROW THE BUMS OUT like never before. It's time to hold our politicians ACCOUNTABLE for their REFUSAL to listen to us about nixing these DOUBLE TAX toll roads!

There's a wave of FRESH, GRASSROOTS candidates that have filed to challenge the incumbent status quo politicians that have run Texas fiscally aground. Texans are now over $35 billion in debt for roads. According to federal stats, Texas is #1 in the nation in road debt! Most of it has been to subsidize toll roads with tax dollars while charging us AGAIN to use the road -- a DOUBLE TAX! The debt is unsustainable and irresponsible. There are not enough Texans who can afford to pay this extra tax on driving just to get to work. We need to reverse course & FAST!

Here's just a few of the key races involving tollers:

Dallas Mayor caves to pro-toll interests on Trinity Toll Road

Link to article here.

Six questions on Rawlings’ support of the Trinity

By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER
Transportation Writer
Dallas Morning News
02 May 2012 11:38 PM

Now that Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings has lined up with his predecessors to support the Trinity River toll road, one minor mystery associated with the project has been answered. But there are still plenty of unanswered questions and unresolved hurdles.


How soon can the project begin? The Federal Highway Administration could issue a decision on the road — whether and where it can be built — by January. That would put the issue squarely in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ lap, which must then approve two separate permits. That could take much of next year. Construction, under the best of circumstances, won’t begin before 2016, with the road open by 2019.

TxDOT tries to back away from non-toll plans on 281, 1604

Though is a HUGE victory to wrestle away 10 miles of toll lanes, carefully notice the word choice here. DFW officials were also promised a non-toll expansion of lanes next to the planned toll lanes on I-35E only to have TxDOT pull the rug out from under them. TxDOT later told them there wasn't enough money to do the non-toll expansion as promised so they'd be building the toll lanes first (the non-toll lanes would come later when, presumably, the funds dropped out of the sky). More background here. San Antonians beware!

Considering the Alamo RMA just got rejected for a federal bailout (known as a TIFIA loan), how do they anticipate securing enough funding to do either 281 or 1604 as a toll road anyway?

LaHood backs off federal ban of cell phone use in cars

Link to article here.

US Transportation Secretary Disavows Cell Phone Story
US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood denies promoting federal cell phone ban legislation.
The Newspaper.com
May 4, 2012

Sec. Ray LaHoodUS Trans- portation Secretary Ray LaHood is distancing himself from reports that he called for a federal law banning all cell phone use behind the wheel. The former Illinois congressman was in San Antonio, Texas speaking at a distracted driving summit. According to a widely cited Reuters report, "LaHood called on Thursday for a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country." Not so, said a spokesman for the department.

Canseco molested by TSA agents AGAIN

Link to article here.

I-TEAM: Congressman Canseco says he was assaulted during TSA pat-down

by Brian New / KENS 5

Posted on April 24, 2012 at 5:30 PM

Updated today at 12:18 PM


U.S. Rep. Francisco Canseco said he was assaulted by a TSA agent at the San Antonio International Airport.

The Texas Congressman said the security agent went too far during a pat-down earlier this month.

"The agent was very aggressive in his pat-down, and he was patting me down where no one is supposed to go,” said Canseco.  “It got very uncomfortable so I moved his hand away.  That stopped everything and brought in supervisors and everyone else."

Canseco told the KENS 5 I-Team the agent said he too was assaulted when Canseco pushed his hand away.
 
According to TSA, neither man was cited.

A week later when going through the San Antonio International Airport, Canseco was once again selected for a pat-down.

"I did not see it as a coincidence,” he said.  “I asked them why are you going to pat me down again, so we discussed it further and after discussing it further, they patted me down."

However, before the discussion was over, San Antonio Police Department officers were called to the security check point area.

Again, no one was cited.

TSA issued the I-Team the following statement about the incident:

"TSA incorporates random and unpredictable security measures throughout the airport. Once a passenger enters the screening process, they must complete it prior to continuing to a flight or secure area."

Canseco said his experience illustrated changes in the airport security are needed.

"It is very important that Americans feel safe and secure as they travel in our nation’s airways - safe and secure from acts of terrorism and all that.  But, I also think that TSA sometimes gets too aggressive, and it's not just about me. It's about every American that goes through those TSA scanners."

The I-Team requested video from TSA of both incidents.  A TSA spokesperson said our request is being reviewed.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE 4/25

TSA issued the following statement:

TSA has been contacted by the Congressman's office and will respond to them directly. Once a passenger enters the screening process, they must complete it prior to continuing to a flight or secure area.

TxDOT's ticking debt bomb

Link to article here.

TxDOT's coming debt 'tsunami'
By Terri Hall
Examiner.com
April 27, 2012

We’ve seen it with AIG’s toxic debt, then the banks with their financial crisis spawned by subprime mortgages, now get ready for the next big bailout -- the toxic debt from toll roads. The Texas Transportation Commission engaged in a day-long lovefest at its April 26 Commission meeting idolizing themselves and like-minded leaders from around the state for indulging in ‘leveraging’ Texans to the hilt and demanded even more debt.

‘Leveraging’ is code for tolling (and now it can also include local revenue streams like property taxes and sales taxes). Their message is clear: no toll roads, no local debt, no money. All this despite the fact that the State of Texas is more than $34 billion in the hole for roads already. Federal data shows Texas tops the nation in road debt.

The bubble that shields Texas Governor Rick Perry’s five appointees to the Commission from direct accountability to the taxpayers allows them to display such a gluttony of anti-taxpayer sentiment. Likewise the rules are the same for the un-elected directors of the Metropolitan Planning Organizations of the four major cities in Texas: Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio that TxDOT trotted out today, and they, too, joined the anti-taxpayer bandwagon. Their motto: put the screws to the taxpayer openly, and often in every conceivable tax & debt scheme no matter the cost or long-term consequences.  This attitude dominates virtually every Commission meeting since Perry took office.

Perry’s largely been able to get away with such behavior from his appointees. Transportation Commissioner, Ted Houghton of El Paso, brazenly called himself “the most arrogant commissioner of the most arrogant state agency in the State of Texas” at a press conference announcing TxDOT pulled the plug on a major Trans Texas Corridor project, TTC-35, due to the threat of litigation back in October of 2009. Rather than punish him for such arrogance, Perry promoted him to Chair of the Commission when long-time crony Deirdre Delisi bolted to run Perry’s failed presidential campaign in 2010.

Commissioner Ned Holmes opened the meeting with high praise for leveraged debt, and he later received adulation for selling-off Texas’ sovereignty by handing some state highways in Houston to private corporations in sweetheart toll road deals called public private partnerships (P3s), despite their higher cost, complexity, and lack of efficiency. Commissioner Bill Meadows then hailed Dallas officials for using leveraged debt to advance $15.3 billion in transportation projects, most all of them toll roads, including thanking the federal government for yet more leveraged debt by giving them a $415 million TIFIA loan to slap tolls on Interstate-35, Texas’ major NAFTA highway through the state. Toll rates won’t be cheap either -- 85 cents a mile -- and this new tax rate will be in the hands of a private corporation whom taxpayers cannot hold accountable.

Traditionally, turnpikes didn’t involve taxpayer money, but rather toll revenue bonds. Private bond investors took all the risk if the traffic didn’t show up to pay tolls and they were brand new roads offered as alternatives to freeways. Now under Perry, ‘innovative financing’ techniques introduced by the likes of Goldman Sachs (responsible for the debt crisis in Greece), the taxpayers are heavily subsidizing toll projects, most of them on existing freeways. The federal TIFIA loan program is one such slush fund for toll projects, many of them propping up privatized toll roads in P3 deals, making TIFIA loans that much more egregious.

So Meadows doing a shout-out to the feds, whom Perry is so fond of slamming, demonstrates just how fiscally reckless Perry’s highway commission is, despite Perry’s claim to a fiscal conservative pedigree. Add to that, the TIFIA loan program is 100% BORROWED money and you begin to see how these toll roads use the identical financing schemes that brought us the subprime mortgage crisis fueled by borrowed money being used to secure more borrowed money and then yet more borrowed money and so on.

DEBT BOMB AND BAILOUTS
This debt bomb is what so-called fiscal conservatives that run Texas want to wreak upon unsuspecting Texans for generations. Indeed, a Commissioner said today that the Commission expects local leaders to ‘leverage every penny’ of the state gas taxes and other revenues it bestows upon each region -- or else don’t ask us for any money. Translation: the Commission is MANDATING that local governments issue debt for STATE highways or they won’t get their due allocations, regardless of state law that prohibits TxDOT from withholding money due to a region if officials decide not to include toll roads.

The rumblings of a bailout for the coming infrastructure bubble just careened into a full throttle earthquake. One local official from the Rio Grande Valley even quipped: “I’ve noticed there’s a tsunami of leveraging.” Taxpayers and commuters weary from high gas prices had better wake-up and hold the Governor, lawmakers, and local elected officials accountable for their fiscal ‘tsunami,’ or they’ll soon be overtaken by it with no turning back.

Toll agency denied federal TIFIA loan, trouble ahead for tolls in San Antonio

Link to article here.

RMA gets rejected for TIFIA loan

By Terri Hall - Examiner.com
April 30, 2012

Good news for taxpayers. The Alamo RMA has been counting on the federal taxpayer to subsidize its toll project on Loop 1604 with a TIFIA loan. However, the feds just announced they denied the Alamo RMA a TIFIA loan on Loop 1604. They also denied the Central Texas RMA a TIFIA loan on the toll project on MoPac in Austin. Without it, the Alamo RMA will be hard pressed to get enough financing together to pull off its first toll project in Bexar County.

Toll viability studies and MPO documents have shown there is no toll viable segment on Loop 1604 -- NONE. In other words, there is not one segment of the 35 mile project that will pay for itself with just the money collected by those who use the road, the toll users. So instead of scrapping the toll idea, they’ve proceeded down the road of expecting public subsidies from EVERY taxpayer in Texas as well as across the nation in order to add lanes to the congested corridor.

So EVERY taxpayer will be paying to build the toll lanes, but only those who can afford to pay up to 50 cents a mile in toll taxes will actually be able to use the lanes in yet another DOUBLE TAX scheme concocted by our politicians. The toll tax rate would also be in the hands of the unelected bureaucrats at the RMA.

Thanks to a new state law, HB 1112, the RMA will also own Loop 1604 in perpetuity if it gets away with slapping tolls on this freeway. This guarantees you’ll be paying tolls in perpetuity -- Executive Director Terry Brechtel even admitted it at the Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) twice, on camera.

So drying up the RMA’s funding sources will help ensure these ill-conceived toll projects will never be built. We need to expand our roads and keep them freeways, not plunge generations into risky debt schemes that are fiscally unsustainable.

Show me the money
Bexar County elected leaders have FAILED to bring home the ‘road’ bacon for nearly a decade, ever since Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Legislature orchestrated the switch from affordable gas tax funded roads to toll roads. Apparently their spines are made of wilted lettuce since they’ve persistently failed to end the diversions of our road taxes to non-road uses and failed to secure the road money we send to both Austin and Washington.

State law prohibits the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), run by a 5 member commissioner appointed by pro-toll Governor Perry, from withholding the allocations due to a region if it chooses not to include tolls in the mix. Yet that’s precisely what TxDOT has been allowed to get away with since the law took effect.

At last Thursday’s Commission meeting, it announced once again that San Antonio will be shorted its due allocation of the recent $2 billion TxDOT windfall by $50-70 million. We should be getting 10-11% by formula according to Texas State Representative Lyle Larson, which would mean $200-$220 million of the $2 billion, but in the Commission’s efforts to punish our community for its resistance to tolls, it only gave us $146 million.

Let me give you a little funding history. In the last DISCO Report for TxDOT, it shows Tarrant County (similar in size and population to Bexar County) received 10.9% of the state total compared to Bexar County’s paltry 2.87%. The Ft. Worth TxDOT District received 13% compared to the San Antonio District’s 5%. Of the discretionary pots of money TxDOT has at its disposal (most often to bribe local officials into tolling), the San Antonio District has received only $349 million compared to Ft. Worth’s $834 million. Even the Pharr and Austin Districts receive more money proportionately than we do, getting $345 million and $479 million, respectively, when San Antonio is the second largest city in the state.

When you look at those figures, it’s looking a whole lot like it’s more than a failure of leadership but outright malfeasance to allow San Antonio to ‘donate’ our tax dollars to everywhere else in Texas while our roads sit in gridlocked congestion and taxpayers are being told there’s no way out of it other than paying MORE taxes through tolls.

The Executive Director of the Houston area MPO even thanked the Commission for moving money from outside Houston to the areas of the state “with the greatest need.” That’s socialism pure and simple, folks. Meanwhile, 281 is tied for FIRST place on the Texas Transportation Institute’s Commuter Stress Index as the THE most congested road in the state of Texas.

What a joke! Houston of all places is showing its lack of priorities in snagging $350 million in gas taxes to subsidize a toll road -- a DOUBLE TAX since your tax money is building the road and yet you have to pay a toll to drive on it. The Grand Parkway, a greenfield project where there's NO congestion and NO traffic demand, is getting funded ahead of existing, congested corridors like 281 & 1604 in San Antonio.

If lawmakers ended the diversions of gas taxes to non-road uses at the state level, and if they dedicated vehicle sales taxes to roads (instead of dumping it into general revenue), Texans would reap $4 billion a year MORE for roads using existing taxes. That would TRIPLE the amount of money to San Antonio without raising a penny in new taxes on driving. That’s not counting what could be reaped from ending the federal gas tax diversions.

Not one politician in this region should be let off the hook for this persistent highway robbery. Time to show these ineffective local leaders the door. Speaker Joe Straus is chief among them. If they can’t prevent our money from being literally stolen by other areas of the state on their watch, they don’t deserve to serve the good people of San Antonio any longer.

The NAFTA Superhighway yet to be built

Link to article here.

The NAFTA Superhighway yet to be built
By Terri Hall - Examiner.com
April 27, 2012


With the appointment of House and Senate conferees for the Federal Highway Bill this week, there’s renewed hope that Congress may be able to pass a bill this year.  The House passed an extension of the current federal highway program known as SAFETEA-LU April 18; however, the Senate previously passed a two year bill called MAP-21, or S. 1813, paving the way for the one remaining interstate highway yet to be built in America to be completed. That interstate is I-69, also known as high priority corridors 18 & 20.

However, it won’t be built as a freeway, the Senate has ensured it will built as a foreign-owned tollway using a public private partnership (P3) due to the structural shortfall in traditional road funding encompassed within the bill as well as the reliance on tolling to make-up the shortfall. The House lacked the votes to pass its long-term federal highway bill, HR 7, and opted to pass a straight extension of SAFETEA-LU in order to set-up a conference committee to hash out the differences on a short-term fix.

Does it have ta be NAFTA?
There’s been much ado about NAFTA superhighways ever since Texas Governor Rick Perry made them the central plank of his transportation platform when he stepped into the Governor’s mansion after George W. Bush became President.

In 2001, Perry already had a pivotal Constitutional Amendment on the ballot in Texas that ended the State’s pay-as-you-go system and opened the door to debt financing. It also paved the way for the Texas leg of the NAFTA superhighways, the Trans Texas Corridor, to be built.

By 2003, the foundation was in place for passage of a loaded omnibus highway bill (the sort no lawmaker actually reads), HB 3588, that created the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) in statute along with quick take eminent domain and a shift to tolling everything that moves, using massive public debt. The 2006 federal highway bill, SAFTEA-LU, created the blueprint for the national push of controversial new ‘innovative’ financing tools and the sale of America’s transportation infrastructure to private entities. SAFTEA-LU also relied on public debt (through the TIFIA loan program) to build roads, most of which would benefit private special interests through P3s.

Congress has until June 30 to work out the differences between the Senate’s MAP-21 and the House extension bill, HR 4348. The House and Senate are worlds apart except for one thing -- the reliance on tolling through ‘innovative financing‘ tools -- the TIFIA loan program and P3s. In MAP-21, Texas scored big by securing an increase in its rate of return of federal gas taxes from 92 percent to 95 percent. But that won’t be near enough to bridge the gap in road needs versus the available funds to build them.

MAP-21 is also chalk full of big daddy government, Agenda 21-style provisions like mandating black boxes be installed in ALL vehicles from 2015 forward (found in Section 31406), opening the floodgates to government tracking of private citizens, as well as mandating vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications -- a blueprint for connecting vehicles and infrastructure together using wireless technology that could eventually be used to dictate actual travel patterns and to charge motorists road taxes by the mile. The Senate bill also grants the IRS the ability to revoke passports (hence inhibit the freedom of travel) of anyone it deems a tax cheat.

Killing the beast they say is already dead
The public backlash to debt financing, foreign-owned toll roads, and these NAFTA superhighway trade corridors has been swift and sure. But most politicians refuse to get the message. When 28,000 Texans put their opposition on the record against Trans Texas Corridor TTC-69/I-69 in 2008, politicians swung into action to try to convince Texans the TTC was DEAD. But it was dead in name only.

Lawmakers failed to repeal it during the 80th session of the Texas Legislature in 2009, and even tried to grandfather the TTC under a different name in a bill that eventually died (due to a fight over a local option gas tax). Though grassroots Texans managed to achieve a total repeal of the Trans Texas Corridor from state statute in 2011, the TTC lives on as the ‘innovative connectivity plan’ through P3s in Texas.

One standout against P3s, is Georgia Governor Nathan Deal, who learned the hard way over the I-85 toll HOT lane snafu, that the public will not go along quietly. He pulled the plug on Georgia’s P3 program earlier this year calling P3s an “ill-conceived sell-out of state sovereignty.” He’s exactly right. P3s virtually ensure that the international trade corridors or NAFTA Superhighways will be completed.

MAP-21‘s TIFIA expansion from $122 million/yr to $1 billion/yr will give states the ability to fund the NAFTA Superhighways beyond I-69. It's no surprise Texas leads the nation in TIFIA awards since there are seven (7) NAFTA trade corridors from Mexico into Texas:

1) Camino Real
2) Spirit
3) La Entrada
4) Ports-to-Plains
5) TTC-35
6) Gulf Crescent
7) TTC-69

The trade corridors ultimately are to connect the United States with Canada and Mexico -- to fulfill the purpose and vision of NAFTA. Though the many special interests who will benefit from these trade corridors have found an easy ‘in’ with Texas politicians, the push certainly isn’t limited to Texas. There’s a battle raging in Michigan over whether a competing bridge at an international border crossing into Canada will be built.

Currently, a private toll bridge, the Ambassdor Bridge, enjoys a monopoly over commercial truck traffic in the area and its owner, Manuel Moroun, is fighting off competition by the Michigan and Canadian governments who are contemplating building a public toll bridge nearby. Dubbed the Detroit International Trade Crossing, the public toll bridge would require $1 billion in public financing to get it built. It would no doubt receive a TIFIA loan, considering a similar project is on the short list to receive a TIFIA loan to replace the Gerald Desmond Bridge at the Port of Long Beach in California, which also boasts a pricetag of nearly $1 billion.

A bill like MAP-21 signed into law would assure the completion of the NAFTA Superhighway trade corridors over the coming decade. Killing these anti-sovereignty, anti-freedom, and anti-taxpayer provisions in MAP-21 is a must if we’re to preserve what’s left of our sovereignty and freedom to travel.

Court rulings trend in favor of property rights

Link to article here.

Supreme Court hits home run on property rights
By Terri Hall
April 18, 2012
Examiner.com

There’s been lots of good news for landowners in recent weeks. First, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of an Idaho couple, Michael and Chantell Sackett, to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that’s designated their home site in an established residential neighborhood as federal wetlands. The EPA threatened the couple with exorbitant fines in excess of $30,000 a day if they didn’t return the land to its original state prior to starting work on building their dream home.

The Sackett case has been watched closely for years, bringing new hope that landowners can indeed fight to protect their property rights after decades of horrible economic development & environmental laws and regulations as well as damaging case law, like the Kelo case, that’s stacked the deck against landowners.

The Sackett’s said in a statement after their unprecedented Supreme Court victory: “We are very thankful to the Supreme Court for affirming that we have rights, and that the EPA is not a law unto itself and that the EPA is not beyond the control of the courts and the Constitution.”

They continued, “The EPA used bullying and threats of terrifying fines, and has made our life hell for the past five years.  It said we could not go to court and challenge their bogus claim that our small lot had ‘wetlands’ on it.  As this nightmare went on, we rubbed our eyes and started to wonder if we were living in some totalitarian country.”

‘Rolling’ shoreline doesn’t fly in Texas
Closer to home, the Texas Supreme Court also recently upheld its prior decision in the case of the Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson against Gulf Coast property owner Carol Severance. The Severance case puts to rest this notion that an easement for a public beach cannot move when a tumultuous natural event dramatically shifts the shoreline onto private property.

Under his interpretation of the Texas Open Beaches Act, Patterson tried to assert that the public easement ‘rolls’ with the shoreline and argued that even though the landowner has no control over naturally occurring shifts in the shoreline (as was the case with her Galveston homes during Hurricane Rita in 2005), his office insisted that her home could be torn down, without compensation of any kind, to make way for the public beach.

The Supreme Court ruled in her favor in November 2010, and re-issued its favorable decision on March 30, 2012, despite granting a re-hearing last year. Another big S-C-O-R-E for Texas property rights.

Won’t let it rest
But a competing interest to property rights in Texas is the oil and gas industry. Devastated by the Texas Supreme Court’s Texas Rice Land Partners v. Denbury Green Pipeline Company decision last August, Denbury Green, backed by key players in the industry, is asking the Texas Supreme Court for another re-hearing of the case, even though the court recently denied the motion for a re-hearing and re-issued its decision in favor of landowners. This time, Denbury Green is narrowing its request to one thing: allow a private pipeline company common carrier status if it transports gas for a company’s own affiliates. If the court grants it, it would gut its entire decision and the basis for the decision in the first place.

At issue is whether or not a private pipeline company has the legal authority to exercise eminent domain. In Texas, a private pipeline company must meet the legal definition of a common carrier in order to gain eminent domain powers. Essentially, for a pipeline company to meet the legal definition of a common carrier it must allow third parties to transport their product through a common pipeline and sell it to or for the public for hire -- that’s the key distinction between whether a pipeline meets the definition of a public use versus a private use.

The Texas Supreme Court ruled that a private company transporting its own product that eventually gets sold to the public is not a legitimate ‘public use’ nor does it meet the definition of a common carrier pipeline.

Justice Don Willet writing for the court states:
“The Texas Constitution safeguards private property by declaring that eminent domain can only be exercised for ‘public use.’ Even when the Legislature grants certain private entities ‘the right and power of eminent domain,’ the overarching constitutional rule controls: no taking of property for private use. Accordingly, the Natural Resources Code requires so-called ‘common carrier’ pipeline companies to transport carbon dioxide ‘to or for the public for hire.’ In other words, a CO2 pipeline company cannot wield eminent domain to build a private pipeline.”

The Court also concludes:
“...the fact that the pipeline ‘will be available for public use from the outset of its operation’...that eminent-domain power cannot extend to the taking of property for private use and that ‘[m]erely offering a transportation service for a profit does not distinguish a private use from a public use.’”

In an effort to get around this very clear decision by the court, Denbury Green seeks to undermine the entire decision by allowing a private pipeline company to masquerade as a ‘public use’ pipeline and gain common carrier status and thus eminent domain authority by simply gaming the system and transporting the company’s own product through its own affiliates. It’s hard to fathom the Texas Supreme Court buying this argument after it unequivocally stated that the Texas Constitution safeguards private property from eminent domain takings for private use, and if there is a conflict, the constitution controls, not statutes.

So it’s clear the industry refuses to allow any precedents that grant property owners the right to challenge the exercise of eminent domain authority by a private entity. So regardless of what the Texas Supreme Court ultimately decides, many anticipate an all-out blood bath in the Texas Legislature next year between property rights advocates and the special interests wishing to exploit eminent domain for private gain.

Why public-private toll roads won’t work

Link to article here.


Why public private toll roads won't work
By Terri Hall
April 17, 2012
Examiner.com

It's hard to disagree with much of what a recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial advocates, like making the highway fund solvent, returning gas tax money sent to Washington back to the states, and loosening the federal strings attached to road money. However, where they're missing the boat is this notion that private money will be the silver bullet to fix road revenue shortfalls and provide what’s often called ‘gap funding.’

There's a hefty price that comes with seeking private money to build public roads using public private partnerships (P3s), as well as loss of sovereignty and control over the surrounding free routes (through non-competes clauses that prohibit or penalize expansion of free roads). Not only are toll rates on these privatized roads punitively higher than public toll roads (75 cents a mile versus 12-15 cents per mile on a public toll road), heaps of taxpayer money subsidize these government-sanctioned monopolies (so having to pay a toll, too, is DOUBLE TAXATION).

Also, these sweetheart P3s deals are structured to GUARANTEE private profits at the public's expense. On the North Tarrant Express project (I-820) in DFW, taxpayers brought three-quarters of the money to the table, the Spanish firm, Cintra, only one-quarter, yet Cintra gets the exclusive right to set and collect tolls (at a rate of 75 cents per mile in peak hours) for the next half century in return for their paltry investment.


The WSJ’s subhead says ‘Americans don’t want to live in LaHood’s car-free utopia,’ knocking Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood’s livability agenda, which is actually a more sanitized name for the United Nations’ Agenda 21 anti-car policies that seek to herd people into high density housing in the inner cities and force motorists out of their cars and into mass transit.

Yet, the very policies the WSJ advocates, P3 toll roads, have the same net effect. It makes driving unaffordable and forces the majority of the traveling public out of their cars or stuck in unbearable congestion on unimproved free routes -- so those who cannot afford to pay 75 cents a mile to get to work will be treated as second class citizens without mobility, even though they continue to pay gas taxes for roads.

The average worker has no control over when he reports to work. Many cannot afford to live close to their jobs, others plain don’t want to. Yet the WSJ and many libertarian and so-called conservative think tanks advocate congestion pricing that gouges commuters during peak hours in an attempt by government, or its private surrogates, to ‘manage’ traffic flow and purposely discourage peak hour travel.

‘Managed lanes’ utilize congestion pricing which is a variable toll rate that changes depending on time of day and level of traffic on the toll lanes. The more cars, the higher the price, creating road scarcity through pricing. Economists love it since their textbook free market theories get put into practice by governments.

However, government-sanctioned monopolies cannot be considered a free market solution to congestion. When there’s only one way to get where you need to go and the state puts that road in the hands of a private corporation who controls the toll rates and dictates how much you’ll have to pay to get to work at your appointed time, that’s not free choice nor free market -- it’s tyranny.

Changing the tide
Georgia Governor Nathan Deal had his own awakening to the threat to state sovereignty by handing control of public roads to private, even foreign, corporations and he pulled the plug on Georgia’s P3 program, calling them “ill-conceived sell-outs” of state sovereignty. Recently, a Cato Institute scholar, Timothy Lee, also reconsidered his support for P3s reasoning that it threatens our freedom to travel. So the tide is turning as the political and financial realities of these failed policies come to light.

So while we need to get a fiscally responsible federal highway bill passed and while we need to give the states back the money they send to Washington and stop diverting road funds to non-road purposes, advocating P3s as part of the solution to make-up structural road funding shortfalls is fiscally irresponsible and a taxpayer rip-off, putting the cost of transportation so far out of reach for the average person that these toll roads will go bankrupt from lack of use, necessitating more taxpayer bailouts and malfeasance.

Texas landowner fights Keystone pipeline through her farm

Link to article here.

Your Land is My Land …

Keystone pipeline company runs roughshod over Texas landowners – and maybe Texas law.

Ft. Worth Weekly
Wednesday, 11 April 2012 08:59 Peter Gorman

When someone from the TransCanada company asked the Crawford family in 2008 about an easement to lay pipeline across their farm on the Texas bank of the Red River, the family wasn’t interested.  Cover4_11_12The Crawfords thought that would be the end of it, and why wouldn’t they? Twice before the family had been approached in a similar fashion by pipeline companies, and when the family said they didn’t want their Lamar County farm disturbed, the companies simply used another route.
But TransCanada wouldn’t do that. The firm, hired to move tar sands bitumen — a mix of sand, clay, and water saturated with an extremely dense petroleum — from Alberta, Canada, to the Houston refineries along what’s been dubbed the Keystone Pipeline XL, upped its offer on the easement a couple of times between 2008 and 2011 from $7,000 to $21,000. When the Crawfords continued to say they weren’t interested, TransCanada went ahead and condemned the land it wanted in September 2011.

Since then, the two parties have been in a legal wrestling match pitting the Crawfords — farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford, her younger brother and sister, and their dad — against a multinational billion-dollar corporation that claims the right to take, by eminent domain if necessary, any land they want to lay pipe on.

It’s the latest version of the David and Goliath story that has already affected thousands of Texans who’ve been steamrolled by the natural gas industry. But this version goes beyond the usual pipeline land-grabs, because it involves a company taking property years before it will obtain a permit to lay the pipe — a company that may not be in compliance with Texas law and therefore may not have the legal right to take anything.

Despite those questions, TransCanada has been involved in at least 89 eminent domain land seizures in Texas alone. The fight involves the issue of which government agency, if any, oversees pipeline companies and their use of eminent domain. Landowners are asking why there is nothing in state law to make a company show the need for a new pipeline before it is allowed to seize private lands — and why individual landowners are having to go to court to thrash out issues that they believe should be covered by state law and public policy.
It’s an issue that seems designed to make Texans, with their love of the land, stand up and shout for answers. But few have. Oil and gas companies, as well as the pipeline companies, generally get to do pretty much as they like here, and even the people who know they can fight also realize they have little chance against companies that can hire lawyers by the carload and drag out lawsuits for years.

In this state, pipeline companies have been turned down only once in more than a hundred years, in taking land by eminent domain. And perhaps the most difficult part of fighting the pipeline companies is that the moment they file to condemn your property through eminent domain, they are considered to own the easement that’s been condemned and have the right to begin laying pipe. That’s a tough hurdle even for a landowner with deep pockets.

The Crawfords are one of a handful of families trying to fight back. They simply don’t want any of their land used for an easement for a pipeline that could rupture and ruin Bois d’Arc Creek, one of their farm’s primary water sources. They don’t want the Caddo Indian artifacts that lie just beneath the surface disturbed. They don’t want to say “How high?” just because a company demands they jump for private profit. For the Crawfords, it’s not about getting a better financial settlement from TransCanada in exchange for allowing them to lay their pipe: It’s about principle.

It will be a tough battle, made even tougher by President Barack Obama’s March 22 promise to fast-track federal approval of the southern leg of the Keystone XL project, a 485-mile stretch from Cushing, Okla., to Port Arthur, with a lateral leg running to Houston’s oil refineries.

The Crawfords know they are in a battle that will be almost impossible to win. But they do have a couple of aces up their sleeves: The portion of the farm that TransCanada wants for an easement is loaded with federally protected Caddo Indian artifacts. And they have farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford, the public face of their fight.

“You never go into a game without knowing you’ve got a chance to win,” the former college hoop star said.

 

 ********


Tall, articulate, resolute, the 53-year-old Crawford says she never intended to become an activist. “But the tar sands issue and the issue of taking people’s land wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. So I went to Washington, D.C., and participated in the rolling two-week demonstrations on the issue last summer.”

The demonstrations were called to convince President Obama to deny permits for the 1,700-mile pipeline intended to run from Alberta to Houston, a pipeline that would exclusively carry tar sands bitumen.

In Washington, Crawford  and 189 other people were arrested Sept. 1 for loitering in front of the White House. Police warned the crowd to move twice, and, when they didn’t, began to arrest people.

“We knew it was going to happen, we knew we were putting ourselves out there for a cause. Still, getting arrested as part of something like that was a very powerful experience for me,” said Crawford. “There were young people, retirees, grandmothers, all protesting the tar sands pipeline project. And the thing was that I understood that I had skin in the game. I was personally affected by the pipeline. But so many of the others were there just on principle, just to say no to the pipeline. That was humbling.”

With the arrests during that rolling demonstration, national media attention began to focus on the pipeline, she said, and some of that spotlight fell on her and the battle at the Red’Arc Farm.

At issue is an easement that would run the length of a 35- to 40-acre field on the southwest corner of the farm that encompasses about 650 acres. The field in question provides the Crawfords’ best grazing for their 32 Red Limousin cows and a Red Angus bull.

“It might seem that it’s just a little piece of land to most people, so why bother to fight,” Crawford said, “but to us it’s our land, and no one should have the right to simply come in and tell us they’re taking it so that they can make a profit. That doesn’t sit well with us.”

The family has a deep love for the farm. Julia Crawford’s grandfather bought it in 1948 and lived on it for years. Her parents moved onto it once Julia and her brother and sister were grown and worked it for 12 years. After his wife died, Julia’s dad moved to nearby Paris, but he still visits several times a week. Julia’s sister, Allison, has her own place that abuts the farm and raises goats and horses there. Julia spent time on the farm with her grandparents while growing up and moved onto it full time in 2010.


Over the years the Red River has changed course, eating away some of the original 700 acres, which is why she describes it as “650 or so” acres. Of that, 400 acres are leased out and farmed for soybean, wheat, and corn.

Even on the leased acres, Crawford is still responsible for turning on the irrigation system, checking the pumps, and occasionally running the combine. “I’m the farm manager, but I’m sort of a farm hand too,” she said. The other 250 acres include fields of hay, some woods, a small orchard, and space for the farm’s three horses to run. It is beautifully kept, with a couple of rolling hills and tall shade trees dotting the land.


Choosing to fight the pipeline company was a tough decision. “My dad, Richard Paul Crawford Jr., and my brother RP the Third, and my sister Allison and I sat around the kitchen table and talked about it. We knew it was going to cost us money we didn’t have, but we just decided it was the right thing to do. We also decided that no matter how much money TransCanada might finally offer, we were going to fight.”

Crawford said the battle is a 24-hour-a-day job, most of it on her shoulders. She’s strong enough to handle it, having grown up on farms as her dad moved around the country to teach and practice as a veterinarian. They moved from Opelika, Ala., where her dad taught at Auburn University and where she was born, to St. Paul, Minn., then to Iowa City, Iowa, and other places, following his teaching jobs. Julia attended Texas A&M University, where she played forward for four years — her senior year as co-captain — on the then-fledgling women’s basketball team. When she finished school she went to work in the cut-throat corporate world as an executive recruiter in Houston, her career for 25 years before moving to the Red’Arc Farm.

While working in the corporate world helped shape the way she interacts with high-powered business people and attorneys, playing college ball helped shape the way Crawford approaches the current fight. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re playing an overpowering team or not. If you go out on that court and don’t think you have a chance to win, then you shouldn’t be out there. And that’s how my family and I feel about the pipeline. We’re not fighting this to lose. We’re fighting to win.”

But TransCanada is a formidable foe, and learning the ins and outs of the pipeline business has been a grueling task. “When you research and discover that these companies have no oversight, by anyone, well, that takes the wind out of you,” she said.

If she were to open a hairdressing shop, Crawford said, “there would be someone from the Texas Cosmetology Commission or whatever out there to check my credentials the next day. But that’s not how it works with pipeline companies. They simply file paperwork with the Texas Railroad Commission, and if it’s filed properly they get their permits and start condemning private property. No agency has the responsibility to check on what they’re doing. The responsibility of the Railroad Commission stops at the moment they hand out those permits.

“Which leaves it up to the landowner to push back,” she said. “And unless you do …  well, a pipeline company in Texas can get away with a lot.”

FEATURE_3
The Crawfords’ iconic Red’Arc Farm sign traces the path of the Bois d’Arc Creek as it empties into the Red River.

Among the things a pipeline company can get away with is taking private property by eminent domain even before it has the permits to build the line. Those permits include the U.S. Army Corps of Engineer water crossing permits, which involve investigating how the pipeline might affect local water sources. Additionally, hydrostatic testing permits — permits to use local public water sources to fill the pipeline to test its strength — must be issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, but the agency has temporarily quit issuing such permits due to last year’s dire drought conditions. TransCanada can get around the need for the TCEQ permit if the company can find sufficient private water sources.
“You have to look at it this way,” said James Bradbury, a Fort Worth attorney who specializes in eminent domain cases and who worked on both gas well ordinance committees during Mayor Mike Moncrief’s tenure. “The pipeline industry is the only industry in the United States where their largest asset is their ability to take private land for personal profit. It’s as simple as that.”

 ********


Private pipeline companies technically do not have the right to utilize eminent domain. That is reserved for what are called “common carriers,” companies that advertise to the public that their pipelines are available to carry petroleum products for any producer, first come, first served, for a published fee. Companies that meet those basic requirements are considered public utilities and therefore have the same rights to acquire private land as a utility company does.

But all that’s required for a company to obtain eminent domain power is a check mark in a box on a form, stating that the firm will become a common carrier. After that it’s up to a landowner to challenge that status if they want to fight a condemnation proceeding.

Not everyone thinks the southern leg of the Keystone XL pipeline fits those requirements. Among those who question that is Debra Medina, a libertarian-leaning Republican  activist who in 2010 lost to Rick Perry in the Republican gubernatorial primary. Shortly after that loss she started WeTexans, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that fights to protect liberty, integrity, and justice through education and legislation.”

Medina said that current Texas law allows for seven products to be moved through common-carrier pipelines. “Those products range from natural gas and light crude to heavy crude and coal,” she said. “But the question is whether bitumen, which is what’s being moved when you move tar sands, is one of those seven products that allow you to be considered a common carrier.”

She pointed out that Enbridge, another Canadian pipeline company that moves tar sands bitumen, argued in United States federal court that it shouldn’t have to pay an excise tax levied on oil pipelines because what Enbridge’s line carries isn’t petroleum. Income from the excise tax pays for the cleanup of oil spills.

“Now if Enbridge is allowed to argue that their product is not crude oil and therefore they do not need to pay into the cleanup fund, how is it that TransCanada, planning on moving the same material, can claim that they are moving crude oil and therefore have the right to acquire land through eminent domain?” Medina asked.

Enbridge was responsible for an 820,000-gallon spill of tar sands bitumen in Michigan that found its way into a 40-mile stretch of the Kalamazoo River watershed — a spill that has been thus far impossible to clean up because the heavy bitumen has settled into the sediment at the bottom of  the river. The EPA initially thought it would take a year to clean the 2010 spill, but by 2011 had revised that estimate to “several years,” and still cannot provide a date when the cleanup will be completed.


Tar sands bitumen, which will be the primary product carried from Oklahoma to South Texas by  the Keystone XL pipeline, is nearly solid at room temperature. To make it light enough to flow through pipelines, natural gas liquids are pumped into it, turning it into a sludge that can still be moved only under extremely high pressure. According to the National Resources Defense Council, the pressure is necessary because the sludge “is between 50 and 70 times as thick as conventional crude oil.”

There is a second reason why TransCanada’s Cushing-to-Texas pipeline might not meet the criteria for common carrier status, Medina said. “I think there is a big legal question of how this is going to be a ‘for the public to hire’ pipeline in Texas when there will be no point of entry for any Texas petroleum products in the entire length of the line.”

Trevor Lovell of Public Citizen, a national nonprofit consumer advocacy group, agreed. “In Texas, if you’re going to utilize eminent domain, you’re supposed to have Texas product in that line. But by contract the new line will be taking primarily tar sands bitumen from the Keystone One line that was completed in 2010, and then it can take some product from the on-ramp at Cushing. But there is no other on-ramp for that line, so no Texas product will be moved.

FEATURE_4
Crawford: “No matter where this thing winds up, I will hold my head up high.”

“Certainly that is an argument that Julia Trigg Crawford can use in fighting the eminent domain on her farm,” Lovell said. “And she can also use the argument that while bitumen is a hydrocarbon, it is not a petroleum product, and the carrier therefore has no right to be classified a common carrier with eminent domain rights in Texas.”
Lovell and Medina are just two of the allies Crawford has picked up in her ongoing battle. Another is the Caddo Nation, which has a key historical site on the land abutting the Crawfords’, a site that spills over into the pasture where TransCanada wants to lay pipe.

Known as the T.M. Sanders site, it includes a Caddo village and ceremonial center dating back to about 1100 A.D. On Feb. 28, Robert Cast, historic preservation officer for the Caddo Nation, wrote to the chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — an independent federal agency that advises the president and Congress on historic preservation policy — noting that since 2009, the Caddo Nation has been requesting a government-to-government consultation with the U.S. Department of State “with respect to the impacts of the Keystone XL pipeline with respect to places of importance to us.”

In the letter, Cast wrote that the Sanders site has been archaeologically investigated since 1931 and that any incursion onto the Crawford farm will put valuable historical artifacts in “imminent peril.”

TransCanada, which did not answer Fort Worth Weekly’s requests for comment, has acknowledged the importance of the Sanders site. On two occasions it sent out archaeologists who discovered important artifacts just beneath the surface of the Crawfords’ pasture. Those findings led the company to alter the course of the proposed pipeline to another section of the field, where the archaeologists said they found no artifacts.

But Crawford wasn’t satisfied and brought in her own archeological specialist last  October to inspect the new proposed easement site. “They did 15 shovel tests — where you just dig with a shovel into the ground and then see what you find — and five of them came up with artifacts,” she said.

Armed with that information and thinking that TransCanada might begin trenching her field at any moment, Julia asked the county court at law in Paris for a temporary restraining order against the pipeline company. It was granted on Feb. 13, but  dissolved on Feb. 24 after a hearing before Judge Bill Harris.

TransCanada  lawyer James Freeman told Harris, “We are not going to have one landowner hold up a multibillion-dollar project that is going to be for the benefit of the public. That is my whole argument.” But Freeman went on to point out that TransCanada legally had possession of the Crawford’s land the moment it was condemned, so the Crawfords had no right to restrain them from doing what they wanted with it.

“I thought that was strange,” said Crawford, “because they had told us they didn’t have possession of the land at other times. But then they said they did when it suited their purpose.”

TransCanada threw another curve when Freeman told Harris the company was planning to bore a hole for the pipeline well below any Caddo artifacts.

“When their attorney said that, he  stood up and showed a picture of the planned horizontal drilling,” Crawford said. “But he never entered that into the court record. And they’ve never mentioned it before or since. Everything they’ve discussed with us involves trenching, which is much less expensive than drilling.”

When the question was raised concerning what material TransCanada would move through the pipeline that would make it a common carrier under Texas law, Freeman said the company was not required to present that information until the pipeline was in operation.

Once she lost the TRO fight, Crawford said, “I began to wake up every morning thinking that I would look out the window and see machines trenching the land.” That has not happened yet, “and I don’t know why it hasn’t,” she said.

“It might just be that they would prefer for this to be quiet for the moment rather than loud,” said Crawford. “And it would get loud, with a lot of press, if they just came in here and started digging before the case is settled.”

 

 ********


Crawford said TransCanada has consistently told her family that everyone along the pipeline route has voluntarily sold rights to easements the company wanted on their property — including when Freeman referred in court to “one landowner” holding up the project.

But Debra Medina said the picture painted by TransCanada is not accurate.

“I was in Delta County, one of the counties affected by this pipeline, and I asked the county attorney if he was aware of any condemnations in his county related to it,” she recounted. “He told me he didn’t think there were any. So I went to the district clerk’s office in the Delta County courthouse and asked them to check the records of any cases where TransCanada or Keystone was a plaintiff. And I was handed a file with six cases in it.”

Since then, Medina has gotten condemnation records from 14 of the 18 Texas counties affected by the southern leg of the Keystone XL. “So far I’ve come up with 89 condemnations in the 14 counties I have,” she said. “And that doesn’t square up with how they’re saying few people are contesting the taking of their property. I mean, the story that TransCanada is painting in Texas is not what it really is. There is one condemnation in every four miles, and then there are those who settled under duress. When someone is holding eminent domain over your head, there is no way to consider that a fair or voluntary agreement.”

Bradbury, the Fort Worth attorney, said TransCanada “has been condemning property on that pipeline for years. It’s a sort of Joseph Heller meets Franz Kafka conundrum. They condemn your land, and then you have to prove the company is not a common carrier. And that’s only happened once that anyone can remember.”

In that case, Texas Rice Land Partners Ltd. and Mike Latta vs. Denbury Green Pipeline-Texas LLC, the Texas Supreme Court ruled in August 2011 that because the pipeline company planned to exclusively move its own product from a mining operation to its own installation, it was not a common carrier and therefore had no eminent domain rights (“Down the Pipe,” Nov. 30, 2011).

“I just don’t know whether the law is clear enough on common carriers,” said Medina. “I want the legislators to look into what constitutes a common carrier. And the legislature says they will bring this up in the House Land and Resource  Management Committee in special session in June. But that’s probably going to be too late to help the Crawfords or any of the other 89 people on the pipeline.”

One key point that Bradbury thinks has been overlooked is that “when pipeline companies say they need eminent domain to lay pipe for the public good, we have no process to investigate whether that pipeline is actually needed. We all think that the only pipelines being built are those that are necessary, but there is nothing in place to evaluate that need.”

In Bradbury’s opinion, if the United States really needs the Canadian tar sands bitumen that the Keystone pipeline will deliver, “the Julia Trigg Crawfords of the world ought to have a forum where that can be demonstrated. We need more checks in place than that.”

Terri Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom and a ferocious advocate for property rights, is furious about the way TransCanada has been handling property acquisition.

“People got in touch with me about this pipeline back in 2008 to ask how TransCanada had the power of eminent domain without the pipeline even being approved or permitted. And you know that the answer is that all that company has to do it walk into the Railroad Commission, fill out a one-page application, and they’re approved, with eminent domain authority.”

Hall said she’s spoken with homeowners, ranchers, and farmers who have been confronted by TransCanada and other pipeline companies and “their armies of attorneys.” Most people don’t even know they can challenge the authority of those companies, she said. “And even if they do, who the heck has the money to go up against billion-dollar companies?”

Hall’s primary fight has been against the condemnations planned for the now mostly defunct Trans-Texas Corridor. But she sees a lot of similarities between that roadway system and the fast-tracked pipeline.

“Look, to have a private company come in and have the right to take your land so that they can make money moving a foreign product across the United States, across Texas to be sold to other foreign countries, is just unbelievable,” she said. “This has nothing to do with bringing oil to the U.S. to ease our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.”

Hall said she has yet to speak with one Texan who likes the idea of eminent domain used in this case — and, she notes, that includes people who support the pipeline. “With every other type of work, from road building to school building, there is an authority that oversees things, someone with regulatory oversight power,” she said. “But there is no one with regulatory power over the pipeline companies’ use of eminent domain. Eminent domain for private gain is alive and well in Texas.”

 

 ********


The Crawford family isn’t wealthy, but they do have a number of supporters who have been contributing to their defense fund via the standwithjulia.com website.

Crawford said she has been surprised and delighted at the public’s response to her family’s situation. “I’m amazed at the generosity of people I will never meet who are sending us their hard-earned dollars to help fight this fight,” she said. “Not knowing if we’re going to win, but just to keep us in the fight.”

Following the dissolution of the original TRO, the Crawfords took their case to the state appellate court in Texarkana, which granted a second TRO on March 3. That, too, was dissolved, a week after it was issued.

The case will now go to trial on the merits in county court at law in Paris. The initial trial date of April 30 could be pushed back to late May or June, Crawford said. The Crawfords and their attorneys are considering asking that the case be divided into two proceedings.

“One would be a jury trial over the value of the land that was condemned,” Crawford said. “TransCanada valued the land as purely agricultural. But my dad had an idea that we could sell five- or 10-acre tracts of that pasture if we ever needed to raise money for the farm. And anything that would be built would be built with the assistance of archaeologists to make certain no artifacts were disturbed. So we want the land revalued, and we’ll present a jury with evidence of that value.”

The second element of the case, to be decided by Judge Harris, would deal with the archaeological importance of the easement in question and whether TransCanada’s pipeline meets the criteria of a common carrier.

Medina said TransCanada is working hard to get some West Texas crude to Cushing so that the line will be carrying some Texas product and thereby qualify as a common carrier.

Asked whether they would sell the easement if TransCanada came up with a huge offer, Crawford said the family is united in wanting to see the court case through.

“And you know what? No matter where this thing winds up I will hold my head up high,” she said. “Even people who disagree with me have been respectful of my willingness to stand up for this cause.”

Hempstead tollway nixed, but tolls coming to Hwy 290


So while one toll road gets nixed, the Hempstead toll road, commuters can still expect to pay more for congestion relief on Hwy 290, despite paying gas taxes to build and maintain roads. Also note, toll users from elsewhere in Houston will be footing the bill for three projects that are advancing to the tune of $480 million. So when you hear toll advocates preach that tolls are better than gas taxes because its a user fee where the user pays for the actual road they're using, don't believe it. It's propaganda designed to make you think tolls are better when, in fact, it's far more costly per mile to use (12 cents to 50 cents or more per mile) than a gas tax funded freeway (1-2 cents per mile), and the toll tax rate is in the hands of unelected boards that the voters cannot hold accountable. So it's runaway Robin Hood taxation, pure and simple.

County declines to develop Hempstead Tollway in favor of toll lanes on Hwy. 290

by Marie Leonard

Community Impact Newspaper - April 10, 2012

ImpactNews.com

Work will begin on projects that will eventually help ease congestion until Hwy. 290. construction is completed.

Following years of planning and debate, Harris County Commissioners Court approved an initial agreement April 10 with the Texas Department of Transportation to add toll lanes to Hwy. 290.

Related

Construction to begin on Hwy. 290
TxDOT, local officials celebrate Hwy. 290 groundbreaking
Hwy. 290 and Houston-area roads drop in rankings of TxDOT's updated 100 most congested roadways list

“All the commissioners know what’s needed in their precincts, and this helps all of you make those improvements that will keep your communities growing,” said Judge Ed Emmett. “I think this is a great step.”

The proposed project—which would be constructed between Loop 610 and the Grand Parkway—calls for building a two or three-lane reversible managed lane facility for high occupancy vehicles and toll traffic, and includes the addition of one general lane in both directions. The project will be similar to the Katy Managed Lanes on I-10, which consist of toll and HOV lanes in the middle of the freeway, according to Eric Hanson, media relations coordinator for the Harris County Tollroad Authority.

The memorandum of understanding—a document that expresses mutual agreement to work together— with TxDOT proposes tolled lanes on three Houston-area highways—Hwy. 290, Hwy. 288 and the Grand Parkway. It also requires specific project agreements for development, financing, maintenance and construction between the two entities before the joint efforts can begin on any of the projects.

“I’ve told TxDOT we will question and seek clarity on four specifics on the 290 agreement—which requires a $400 million investment—and provides for additional capacity with the provision of managed lanes,” said Art Storey, executive director of the Harris County Public Infrastructure Department.

The county will request a share of the fees for the toll operations, and it will seek a credit for its investment of approximately $80 million for advanced funding for Segment E of the Grand Parkway.

“TxDOT officials have assured me all these issues can be addressed as we work toward project agreements,” Storey said. “We’ll see if they can be agreed upon.”

Several projects to improve Hwy. 290 have been proposed in the past few years, including the Hempstead Toll Road. In favor of rebuilding Hwy. 290 with toll lanes, Harris County is no longer pursuing the project, according to Hanson. When construction begins on Hwy. 290, TxDOT plans to rehabilitate Old Hempstead Road, which will serve as an alternative route.

Although the item was approved unanimously, Commissioner Jack Morman added an amendment to the memorandum of understanding.

“I had serious reservations and concerns, which stemmed from the fact I was concerned our $400 million contribution would put other [Harris County Toll Road Authority] projects further back,” he said.

Morman made a motion to amend the item—but not the memorandum of understanding—to ensure the agreement would not further set back any HCTRA projects in any of the county’s precincts.

At a capital projects review in June, schedules and resources will be laid out for meeting the challenges in the agreement, as well as for other projects on the horizon, Storey said.

“This is a worthy and significant step forward for 290, 288 and the Grand Parkway, but not the whole distance,” he said.

Toll rates to be up to 50 cents a mile in SA

So if San Antonio wasn't awake to the runaway, punitive taxation of toll roads before now, let this article below be a wake-up call...can you afford to pay 50 cents a mile in NEW taxes to get to work? Didn't think so...also consider, do you want the toll tax rates to be in the hands of an unelected board whom taxpayers cannot hold accountable? Do you want this unelected toll authority, RMA, to own these state highways in PERPETUITY versus have these roads revert back to free parts of the state highway system once the improvements are paid for? Well, If your answer to all of the above is 'No,' then you had better start getting involved in nixing these ill-conceived toll schemes...

On March 26, 2012, the San Antonio Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) voted to take certain segments of 281 & 1604 out of the toll plans and make them non-toll projects. After a seven year long grassroots tax revolt, vigilance finally PAID OFF!

US 281 from Loop 1604 to Stone Oak Pkwy and Loop 1604 from Hwy 90 to Bandera Rd on the west side and from I-10 E to I-35 on the east side will now be done WITHOUT TOLLS. But the remaining portion of Loop 1604 from Bandera Rd. to I-35 will have added 4 added toll lanes (2 each direction) called ‘managed lanes.’ Over 50 toll projects still remain on the books at the MPO at this moment, including adding toll lanes to I-35, I-10, the southern leg of Loop 1604, and tolling most all upgrades to every interchange between these highways.

Can you pay 50 cents PER MILE in tolls?
At it’s Board Meeting April 12, 2012, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority (RMA) adopted a range of toll rates they plan to charge motorists to use the new managed toll lanes. The RMA will charge from 17 cents up to 50 cents PER MILE -- often the highest rate will be charged during peak hours (or commute hours, when most people need to use the road).

They’re ‘managed’ lanes because this un-elected government bureaucracy wants to ‘manage’ your morning commute and charge you a premium to access these lanes during rush hour.

The tolls may be variable rates that change with time of day and level of traffic on the toll lanes.  If too many people use the lanes, they’ll change the toll in real time to bump cars off the lanes by increasing price.

Government no longer wishes to fix congestion, it wishes to manipulate congestion for profit. These new-fangled toll lanes added to existing, paid for, right-of-way also have non-compete agreements that limit or prohibit the expansion of free lanes/routes surrounding the toll lanes -- guaranteeing congestion on the free routes and forcing us to pay the new tax on driving.

Also, none of these toll projects are toll viable, which means they know up front there won’t be enough projected traffic to pay for the cost of the expansion. Rather than nix the toll project, the RMA plans to SUBSIDIZE the toll lanes by building them with gas taxes and other public money in addition to the toll revenue bonds. But you won’t be able use the lanes without paying ANOTHER tax, a toll. So these toll schemes are DOUBLE TAXATION!

Tolls in perpetuity? Permanent NEW tax on driving
The Texas Legislature passed a bill, HB 1112, in the 82nd session in 2001, that gives RMA’s ownership of these segments of state highways in PERPETUITY. Why would they seek ownership of our state highways in PERPETUITY? Because they want to charge you tolls in PERPETUITY! On October 26, 2009, Terry Brechtel, the Executive Director of the RMA admitted they plan to keep the toll in place in perpetuity, after the improvements are paid for.

Toll rate range approved

By Vianna Davila, San Antonio Express-News

Published 02:38 p.m., Thursday, April 12, 2012

The public got its first preview of the tolls Bexar County drivers might one day pay, after the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority board amended its policies Thursday afternoon to include a range of possible toll rates.

The range, which could be anywhere between 17 and 50 cents per mile, would increase by a certain percentage every year, once a toll road is built and operational.

The board also formally exercised the RMA's right to build tolls on Loop 1604, should those projects ever come to pass.

The decision will not impede the recent proposal by Bexar County Commissioner Kevin Wolff to expand parts of Loop 1604 without tolls; but it ensures the RMA will be in charge of any future toll projects along other parts of the corridor.


Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Toll-rate-range-approved-3477958.php#ixzz1sJloHo7K

WSJ: Why your highway has potholes

Link to article here.

It's hard to disagree with much of what this Wall Street Journal editorial advocates, however, where they're missing the boat is this notion that private money will be the silver bullet to fix road funding issues. There's a hefty price that comes with seeking private money to build public roads using public private partnerships (P3s), as well as loss of sovereignty and control over the surrounding free routes. Not only are toll rates on these privatized roads punitively higher than public toll roads (75 cents a mile versus 12-15 cents per mile on a public toll road), heaps of taxpayer money subsidize these government-sanctioned monopolies (so having to pay a toll, too, is DOUBLE TAXATION) and the sweetheart deals are structured to GUARANTEE private profits at the public's expense. On the North Tarrant Express project (I-820) in DFW, taxpayers brought three-quarters of the money to the table, the Spanish firm, Cintra, only one-quarter, yet Cintra gets the exclusive right to set and collect tolls for the next half century in return for their paltry investment.

So while we need to get a fiscally responsible federal highway bill passed and while we need to give the states back the money they send to Washington, advocating P3s as part of the solution to make-up structural shortfalls is fiscally irresponsible and a taxpayer rip-off, putting the cost of transportation so far out of reach for the average person that these toll roads will go bankrupt from lack of use, necessitating more taxpayer bailouts.

Why Your Highway Has Potholes

Americans don't want to live in Ray LaHood's car-free utopia.

Wall Street Journal - Editorial

April 16, 2012

Nothing shows off the worst of Congress like a highway bill. And this year's scramble for cash is worse than ever because the 18.4 cent a gallon gasoline tax will raise $70 billion less than the $263 billion Congress wants to spend over the next five years. Let the mayhem ensue.

The Senate has passed a two-year $109 billion bill sponsored by Barbara Boxer of California that bails out the highway trust fund with general revenues, including some $12 billion for such non-essentials as the National Endowment for the Oceans and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The bill requires little or no reform. The prevailing Senate view is the more concrete that gets poured, the more jobs back home. So more "shovel-ready" nonstimulus.

House Republicans oppose the Senate version amid a $1.3 trillion deficit and have their own bill to give states more flexibility—though still not enough—on how to spend transportation dollars. Congress had to pass a temporary 90-day extension of highway funding through June 30 because the two sides can't agree.

What's missing is any new thinking. Clear evidence of inefficient transportation spending comes from a new Treasury study estimating that traffic gridlock costs motorists more than $100 billion a year in delays and wasted gas. In cities like Los Angeles, commuters waste the equivalent of two extra weeks every year in traffic jams. This congestion could be alleviated by building more highway lanes where they are most needed and using market-based pricing—such as tolls—for using roads during peak travel times.

That makes too much sense for Washington. In a typical year only about 65 cents of every gas tax dollar is spent on roads and highways. The rest is intercepted by the public transit lobby and Congressional earmarkers. Then there are the union wages that pad the cost of all federal projects. The New York Times reported in 2010 that 8,074 Metropolitan Transportation Authority employees made $100,000 or more in 2009 even as the system loses money.

Transit is the biggest drain. Only in New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. does public transit account for more than 5% of commuter trips. Even with a recent 2.3% gain in bus and rail use due to high gas prices, public transit still accounts for a mere 2% of all inner-city trips and closer to 1% outside of New York.

Since 1982 government mass-transit subsidies have totaled $750 billion (in today's dollars), yet the share of travelers using transit has fallen by nearly one-third, according to Heritage Foundation transportation expert Wendell Cox. Federal data indicate that in 2010 in most major cities more people walked to work or telecommuted than used public transit.

Brookings Institution economist Cliff Winston finds that "the cost of building rail systems is notorious for exceeding expectations, while ridership levels tend to be much lower than anticipated." He calculates that the only major U.S. rail system in which the benefits outweigh the government subsidies is San Francisco's BART, and no others are close to break-even.

One reason roads are shortchanged is that liberals believe too many Americans drive cars. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has been pushing a strange "livability" agenda, which he defines as "being able to take your kids to school, go to work, see a doctor, drop by the grocery or post office, go out to dinner and a movie, and play with your kids in a park, all without having to get in your car." This is the mind of the central planner at work, imagining that Americans all want to live in his little utopia.

The current scheme also creates giant inequities. Politically powerful cities get a big chunk of the money, while many Western and Southern states get less back than they pay in. But why should people in Akron, Ohio or Casper, Wyoming have to pay gas taxes to finance the New York subway or light rail in Denver? One reason there is so much overspending on inefficient urban transit is that federal matching dollars require residents in other states to foot up to half the bill.

The best solution would be to return all the gas tax money to the states, roughly in proportion to the money each pays in. This would allow states and localities to determine which roads and transit projects they really need—and are willing to pay for. California could decide for itself if it wants more roads, whether it can afford high-speed rail, and whether it wants to use congestion-pricing on crowded roads. The House Transportation Committee has found that getting a permit for a new road costs twice as much, and takes three times as long, when federal money is included than when financed with private or local dollars.

Less federal control would also allow states to lure billions of dollars of private financing for new roads, which experts like Mr. Winston believe is the next big thing in transportation financing but is now generally prohibited. One of the worst features of Ms. Boxer's Senate bill is that she would exacerbate the funding shortage by adding new penalties if states leverage private dollars to build new toll roads and bridges.

The Senate's highway-fund bailout will only perpetuate the spending misallocation that has contributed to traffic nightmares. It will also run up the deficit. If Congress really wants to enhance the livability of cities and suburbs, it will pass a highway bill that builds more roads.

A version of this article appeared April 16, 2012, on page A14 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Why Your Highway Has Potholes.

Increased speed limits more about profits than safety

TxDOT increases speed limits to 80 MPH, why may surprise you

By Terri Hall

Examiner.com

April 13, 2012

The Texas Transportation Commission recently passed a Minute Order allowing the posted speed limits on Texas highways to go up to 80 MPH, if traffic studies show its safe.

At a time when motorists are more concerned than ever about ways to conserve fuel and stretch every gallon of gas, this move by the Commission seems ill-timed, and some would even say, reckless (regarding safety).

However, the most disturbing reason for this change in speed limits is what we warned the Texas Legislature of in 2011 -- this is about maximizing toll revenues for a private, foreign corporation, Cintra, as well as for the State of Texas. Both our lawmakers and TxDOT are making transportation decisions based on profit potential, not public safety.

It's no secret that the traffic levels on SH 130 have been abysmal, and TxDOT has been searching for ways to boost the number of cars that take the toll road, even lowering toll rates 67%. But this move to increase speed limits is based solely on the prospect of a higher share of toll revenues TxDOT will split with Cintra when its two segments of SH 130 open later this year.

Details are in the public private partnership contract inked in 2007. TxDOT gets a greater share of the toll revenue for every 5 MPH increase in the speed limit up to 85 MPH (See Exhibit 7). Also, once the contract was signed, TxDOT had to either raise the speed limits on Cintra’s tollway, or reduce speed limits on ‘competing’ I-35 (read here and here) or face having to compensate Cintra for any loss in toll revenue absent the changes in speed limits. It’s part of the contract called a non-compete clause that penalizes or restricts what the government can do on ‘competing’ free routes, including imposing restrictions on expansion or the usability of free alternatives.

If any doubt looms that this speed limit hike isn’t connected to Cintra or the ill-fated Trans Texas Corridor (Cintra company once dreamed of building), look no further than the bill to repeal the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) that passed last session. Two key provisions of the TTC lived on in HB 1201 -- Cintra lobbied hard to make sure of it. Embedded within the bill is a provision to allow the state to increase speed limits up to 85 MPH. Less than a year later, TxDOT delivered for Cintra -- at least to 80 MPH, 10 MPH over the &) 70 MPH maximum on stretches of I-35.

The second is a provision to allow overweight trucks to use the tollway. Cintra’s tollway is specifically built to attract overweight trucks loaded-up with massive cargo imported from China and transported into the U.S. via Mexico’s deepwater port, Lazaro Cardenas, and eventually onto Cintra’s SH 130 bypass around Austin’s congested I-35.

The statute reads: “The commission may authorize the operation of a vehicle that exceeds the weight limitations of Subchapter B, Chapter 621, or the size limitations of Subchapter C, Chapter 621, on a lane designated as an exclusive lane under this section if supported by an engineering and traffic study...”

Usually trucks have weight limits, but that flies out the window under this scenario. SH 130 is considered the only part of Trans Texas Corridor TTC-35 that will ever be built in Central Texas (NOTE: two projects in North Texas -  Southwest Parkway/Chishom Trail and a loop around Rockwall County are also regarded as part of the TTC). The message this sends to private corporations is that laws can be suspended if you pay the State enough money for the right to set your own rules.

In addition, it's abundantly obvious that TxDOT is making transportation decisions based on profits and private interests when you factor in the fact that the Commission also recently passed a Minute Order last year implementing a dual designation of existing potential feeder roads into SH 130. The scheme there is to add an additional designation on parts of free interstates I-410 and I-10 from San Antonio to Seguin as SH 130, leaving drivers who wish to continue on a free road stranded. Once drivers get to Seguin, they'll realize there is no way north unless you take the foreign-owned tollway, SH 130.

Case closed, TxDOT is sold out to special interests.

One thing is certain, you can count on Austin and Seguin’s finest to be out en force to issue plenty of speeding tickets along I-35 once Cintra’s segments of the SH 130 tollway open. Anything the state can do to dissuade motorists from using free routes and onto the foreign-owned tollway, they’ll do.

Are states making a mistake by privatizing roads?

Link to article here.

Yet again, a state should NEVER give up state sovereignty over public infrastructure as a quick fix to bail out politicians' financial messes and failure to make road funding a priority and failure to keep their mitts off road taxes. Politicians habitually raid road taxes for non-road purposes then come to gridlocked commuters and want to force them to pay more to get out of congestion.

Public private partnerships (P3s) are the most expensive, most anti-taxpayer, sovereignty-destroying way to do toll roads. Gov. McDonnell ought to take a page out of the playbook of Gov. Nathan Deal in Georgia -- it's not worth selling-off state sovereignty to get a road built. Under NO circumstances should the profit margins of private corporations supercede the public interest! P3s put taxation in the hands of corporations whom the public cannot hold accountable for out of control taxation. They also grant state-sanctioned monopolies to private interests who then control public infrastructure for a half century or more!

More states privatizing their infrastructure. Are they making a mistake?

By Brad Plumer, Washington Post

Published: March 31 | Updated: Sunday, April 1, 8:00 AM

Joe Raymond/Associated Press Is this the future of transportation? Say you’re a state politician. Your local roads, bridges, and transit systems are all in dire need of upgrades. But there’s not much money left. Budgets are crunched. No one wants to raise taxes. And Congress is throttling back on transportation funding. So what’s left? Privatization, of course.

Maryland is the latest state looking to join the fray. At the moment, its legislature is mulling a bill that would encourage the government to seek out private companies to build, operate, and maintain the state’s roads, bridges, and public buildings. Virginia adopted this approach nearly a decade ago. And a growing number of states — from California to Florida — have been bringing in private capital to bankroll their transportation needs. But is privatizing infrastructure really such a good idea?

There are two main ways for a state to bring in private money for transportation. The first is to sell off assets that have already been built. This is what Indiana did in 2006, under Governor Mitch Daniels, when it leased its 157-mile Indiana East-West Toll Road to an international consortium of investors for $3.8 billion. The private companies have agreed to operate and maintain the roads for 75 years. In return, they get to hike the road’s tolls each year — by either 2 percent, the inflation rate, or the increase in GDP, whichever is higher.

While advocates claim that the private sector can operate these toll roads more efficiently, the major appeal of these moves is to solve short-term budget crunches. Essentially, state officials are giving up a source of revenue that’s spread out over a number of years — in Indiana’s case, tolls — and receiving a lump of cash upfront. “You might get less money overall, but you get it upfront, so that officials can go build the things they want to build,” explains Joshua Schank, the president of the Eno Center for Transportation. What’s more, the private firms are the ones that take the heat for raising fees and tolls, instead of nervous politicians.

Yet these sales can be controversial. The deals are frequently complicated and it can be difficult to assess how good a bargain the states are actually getting. Daniels has called the Indiana Toll Road transaction “the best deal since Manhattan was sold for beads.” Yet residents are still discovering surprises in the 600-page agreement — as when Indiana had to reimburse the operators for lost revenue after waiving tolls for safety reasons during a 2008 flood.

The other way to privatize infrastructure is to have a private firm take charge of building a road, bridge, or transit system from the start. From a global perspective, this isn’t a radical idea. Countries like France, Spain, and Australia have long harnessed these public-private partnerships to build their highways and rail lines. “Compared to other countries, we’re way behind on this,” says Schank. (Indeed, that’s why the large firms that handle these public-private contracts are often European — foreign companies have all the expertise.)

Here’s how this setup would work. Say a state wants to build or upgrade a highway. Various private companies will bid for the project, and the winning bidder has to raise enough money from outside investors to design, operate, build, and maintain the highway for a fixed number of years. The firm is allowed to recoup its costs through tolls and the like over that span. Because the private company is on the hook for the whole thing, it has an incentive to keep costs as low as possible and finish the road on time.

“The idea here,” says Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, “is that the government is only commissioning projects where the private sector is willing to put its skin in the game.”

There’s some evidence that privately operated infrastructure projects can get built more quickly — and for less money — than projects wholly overseen by the government. One 2007 study (pdf) from Allen Consulting and the University of Melbourne looked at 54 large infrastructure projects in Australia and found that the privately financed ones had smaller cost overruns and were more likely to be finished on schedule than those financed through traditional public-sector methods.

Virginia, for one, has found that such partnerships can offer a way to get around funding logjams. For years, the Virginia Department of Transportation has wanted to relieve congestion on the I-495 Capital Beltway. But the state’s preferred plan involved adding two carpools in each direction on the most congested portions — at an unpalatable cost of $3 billion. Then, in 2004, the state was approached (pdf) by two companies, Fluor and TransUrban, that offered to raise private funds to add two high-occupancy toll lanes in each direction, and do it in a sleeker way that wouldn’t require as much widening of the Beltway. In the end, Fluor-TransUrban is planning to do it for a mere $1.4 billion, and the electronic toll system is set to begin later this year.

“No bureaucratic provision was a problem for them,” Ron Kirby, transportation director for the Washington Area Council of Governments, noted of Fluor in a recent issue of Public Works Financing. “It was ‘Tell me the issue and I’ll figure out a way to solve it.’”

But before getting too excited about the magical powers of private firms, experts warn that there are potential pitfalls to these arrangements. For one, as Robert Puentes of Brookings noted in a recent paper (pdf), these are complicated multi-decade financial arrangements. And “many states,” he notes, “lack the technical capacity and expertise to consider such deals and fully protect the public interest.” For another, the deals need to be structured wisely — in Maryland, for instance, Republicans have warned that certain provisions in the pending Senate bill could allow the government to circumvent the competitive bidding process. (The bill itself does, however, create several layers of review.)

Moreover, a road that’s privately owned for 75 years has the potential to conflict with other public-policy goals. For instance, as a recent GAO report (pdf) found, four of the five privately-funded toll road projects in the last 15 years included non-compete clauses that prevented the government from building nearby roads. As Tim Lee notes, “real-world privatization schemes are often explicitly protectionist.” So what if a state, say, later decides that it wants to build a rail network that competes with the private road? All sorts of complications could arise.

Plus, privatization can’t work everywhere. “It’s not a universal tool,” says Jonathan Peters, a professor of finance at the College of State Island who has studied these partnerships. There are plenty of roads in states like Montana, for starters, that don’t pay for themselves and would be unappealing to private investors. There are ways around this — Madrid, for one, built its subway system by offering formula-based subsidies to private firms, which still bore the risk of a shortfall in rider demand — but it’s trickier. Few transportation experts think we can fill our multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure shortfall with private money alone.

Still, as many states find themselves scrounging under sofas for cash, privatization may prove increasingly appealing. And drivers, at least, sometimes appear more receptive to paying for roads via tolls, where it’s obvious what the money’s going toward, than via gas taxes. “The lack of revenue,” says Peters, “is really forcing people to consider these options more seriously.”

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Eminent Domain

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