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Check them out below...
Terri Hall's anti-toll rebuttal to KSAT 12-TV's pro-toll editorial here.
Bill Thornton's pro-toll rebuttal to Hall's rebuttal here
Wentworth wants ATD road money returned to roads
By Vianna Davila
Updated 12:35 a.m., Wednesday, March 28, 2012
State Sen. Jeff Wentworth has requested a formal opinion from Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott regarding the use of Advanced Transportation District funds for VIA Metropolitan Transit's downtown streetcar project.
In the filing, submitted Monday afternoon, Wentworth asks for consideration of three points:
• Whether VIA entered into a contract with the voters when its campaign literature, supporting the 2004 election to create the ATD quarter-cent sales tax, promised the money would never go to light rail. Streetcar, the letter states, is the same as light rail. VIA has said the two types of transit are different — that a streetcar system doesn't constitute light rail.
• Whether VIA and Bexar County may use ATD revenue to pay for a streetcar project when the transit agency said only half the money would go toward public transit. The amount of ATD-related revenue that VIA and the county are proposing to use for streetcars, the letter states, would mean more than half the overall ATD money would go to public transportation.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Wentworth-asks-Abbott-to-weigh-in-on-spending-3438566.php#ixzz1qXWbkaji
House passes another short-term extension to federal highway bill
Senate bows to House to extend transportation funding for 90 days
By Ashley Halsey III, Thursday, March 29, 11:24 AM
Angry Senators on Thursday bowed to the will of the House with a 90-day extension of transportation funding two days before a deadline that could have shutdown highway and transit projects across the nation.
“They run off on their vacation and leave the people twisting in the wind,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) said in a condemnation from the Senate floor.
Despite several efforts to advance a bipartisan Senate bill championed by Boxer, House leaders opted for a three-month extension while they try to break a deadlock that has stalled their own proposal to fund transportation by expanding offshore oil drilling.
The extension leaves transportation financing in an increasingly precarious position.
After a morning of angry, finger-pointing debate, the House voted to extend the nation’s transportation funding at current levels for 90 days, counting on the Senate to follow suit before the money runs out at midnight Saturday.
Undaunted, Rep. Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.) rose to repeat the charge that Republicans had behaved like circus clowns in fumbling their own five-year transportation funding bill, which stalled in the face of bipartisan opposition and a hail of outside condemnation.
The vote came at the critical moment in the annual construction cycle, the eve of the launch season for highway projects.
Finally non-toll fix to 281 & 1604 approved by MPO
Funding proposal approved; no tolls — for now
By Vianna Davila
Updated 12:11 a.m., Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Toll road foes cheered on an ecstatic Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson on Monday, as he lauded a funding proposal to expand parts of U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 without tolls.
“If you are persistent, you can get it done,” said Terri Hall, founder of the toll road opposition group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, and an activist known to have Adkisson's ear. He invited Hall to speak at a press conference on the issue following remarks by several elected officials, including County Commissioner Kevin Wolff, who came up with the proposal to fund 16 miles of expressways.
As approved by the San Antonio Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization later Monday, Loop 1604 from Bandera Road to U.S. 90, and U.S. 281 from Loop 1604 to Stone Oak Parkway would be expanded without tolls.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Funding-proposal-approved-no-tolls-for-now-3436057.php#ixzz1qXVTxW3h
Executive Order to takeover ‘civil transportation’
By Terri Hall
March 25, 2012
The Examiner.com
March 16, President Barack Obama signed an Executive Order entitled the National Defense Resources Preparedness Act, which effectively gives the President and members of his cabinet the power to confiscate ‘civil transportation,’ even in peacetime, under the guise of national security. It relates to the Defense Production Act of 1950 and builds on a Presidential Directive, PD 51, signed by George W. Bush. Obama takes it further in shocking detail.
In short, the Order authorizes a government takeover of virtually all resources, both natural resources and industrial resources, in the name of ‘national defense’ -- civil transportation, emerging technologies, all energy resources including oil, gas, solid fuels, renewable energy (even solar and wind!), pipelines, electricity, agriculture, food, farm equipment, fertilizer, and health resources (all drugs, medical devices, and facilities), and WATER.
Considering Communist and other anti-democratic regimes believe all resources belong to the State, the power this grants the President and his un-elected cabinet is staggeringly anti-American and anti-freedom. He can takeover all national resources, including labor and the private sector economy, and re-allocate them and ration them back to us however he sees fit.
Continue reading on Examiner.com Executive Order to takeover ‘civil transportation’ - San Antonio Transportation Policy | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/transportation-policy-in-san-antonio/executive-order-to-takeover-civil-transportation#ixzz1qAMi9kDR
Proposal to fix Hwy 281 North without tolls on horizon
Proposal without tolls aims to ease congestion
By Vianna Davila
Updated 04:58 a.m., Friday, March 23, 2012
A solution to worsening congestion on North U.S. 281 and on Northwest Loop 1604 might finally be in sight, but without tolls.
Sections of both would be widened into expressways, eliminating traffic lights and adding ramps and frontage roads, maybe as early as 2015, if a plan forged by Bexar County Commissioner Kevin Wolff comes together.
Wolff has suggested using San Antonio's share of newly found state transportation money, combined with local dollars, to build 3½ miles of expressway on U.S. 281 from Loop 1604 to Stone Oak Parkway and 12½ miles on 1604 between U.S. 90 and Bandera Road.
The corridors' existing “superstreets” would be removed. The superstreets, which cost a combined $13.1 million, expedite traffic flow through the use of synchronized lights and turnarounds. They were designed as temporary congestion solutions.
But Wolff's plan must first clear several hurdles. Local authorities don't know how much of the $2 billion in state money San Antonio will get and whether it will be restricted. They also have to work out how to pull together the local share. The cost to expand portions of the two highways is also unknown. Still, if the plan works out, no tolls would be required for one of the biggest highway expansion projects in San Antonio in more than two decades.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Expansion-of-U-S-281-and-Loop-1604-looking-3428717.php#ixzz1qAHxFQ4s
Couple's fight with pipeline company pits Texans' love of oil vs love of land
It appears TransCanada, the Keystone pipeline company out of Canada, is not the only pipeline company bullying Texans with eminent domain.
Couple's fight with pipeline company pits Texans' love of oil vs. love of land (Video)
Story by Dianna Wray
The Victoria Advocate
January 28, 2012 at 12:00 a.m., updated January 29, 2012 at 8:38 a.m.
After construction has ended for the day, a large hole that will be used to run a Kinder Morgan pipeline under the road lies on Jimmy and Kathy Gips' land in Cuero. Although no agreement has been signed by either party and the couple is in litigation with the company, work has begun on the couple's land, which was seized using the company's right of eminent domain.
CUERO - Blue eyes narrowed, Kathy Gips lifted her chin and stepped closer to the barbed wire fence lining her pasture land.
Eyeing the workmen on her land, she crossed her arms, a petite blond woman perched ramrod straight in the long shadow of her husband.
"It feels like we're being run over," she said, stopping to press her lips together.
Jimmy Gips looked down at his wife of 24 years and the laugh lines on his face sagged into lines of frustration.
"It is our land after all. Don't we matter?" he said, ruffling his sandy hair.
The Gipses are one of hundreds in the Crossroads with pipelines crisscrossing their property. For the Gipses and others, their worries aren't about fracking or possible pollutants. For them, the problems start with two legal words: eminent domain.
The Eagle Ford Shale play has unlocked thousands of barrels of oil from the dense brittle rock formation that lies in the depths below their feet. But the oil has to make it to market, and to do that efficiently companies need pipelines. They will buy the right to put in the steel lines, but if you don't cooperate, these private companies use their power of eminent domain - the legal authority to take privately owned land for the public good.
The Eagle Ford Shale play is booming, but the pipelines being laid to get the glut of oil to market have put those two Texas passions - landownership and the oil business - on a collision course.
THE FIGHT BEGINS
The sky glittered blue, and a northern wind tugged at the Gipses' clothes, pulled at their hair and sent the smell of the land, a mix of dried grass and the sweet stench of cow manure, into their nostrils.
In May, the Gipses got a call from a Kinder Morgan landman. The company wanted to run a pipeline through their property and wanted to start negotiations. But negotiations skidded to a halt when the company offer came in for $23.98 a foot, 15 percent less than what the Gipses got for a pipeline crossing the same stretch of land before.
Kathy Gips got a certified letter informing her she was being sued. Kinder Morgan was going to use eminent domain to condemn the land it wanted for the pipeline.
The deck was stacked against the couple. Kinder Morgan held all the cards, and the multimillion dollar company knew it. There was one thing they hadn't counted on - the Gipses aren't the kind of people used to being run over. They decided to fight.
THE ATTORNEY
Michael Sheppard is a tall man with a sharply cut profile and a ready smile that belies his years of legal experience. Sheppard, the district attorney covering DeWitt, Goliad and Refugio counties since 1997, cut his legal teeth on oil and gas law in the 1980s, and he knows his business. He was the obvious choice to represent Kathy and Jimmy Gips.
His firm, Crain and Sheppard, has handled more than 1,200 pipeline negotiations in the past three years, dozens of them with Kinder Morgan. Sheppard handled two other eminent domain cases with Kinder Morgan, but both were settled after being heard by special commissioners, one of the first steps in condemnation proceedings. Working as the DA, Sheppard has his hands full, so he limits the number of civil cases he'll take on, examining the quality of the case to weigh out if it's worth the trouble.
He took the Gipses' case.
Eminent domain is the big hammer pipeline companies use, but most try to keep things friendly.
Kinder Morgan is different, Sheppard contends.
"They use the power of eminent domain to strong-arm people. They've got so much money they want to spend and they aren't going to spend any more. They use the process and what the landowner has to go through - which is very expensive for the landowner - and they use it to their advantage," he said.
WHAT KINDER MORGAN SAYS
When a deal closes later this year, the Houston-based company, Kinder Morgan, will be the largest pipeline company in the United States and the fourth largest in North America. The company, formed by former Enron executives in 1997, will own more than 67,000 miles of pipeline across the United States.
The pipeline being laid across the Gipses' land will have the capacity to run more than 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Cuero to the Houston Ship Channel. It will cost $220 million and includes 61 miles of newly constructed pipeline and 109 miles of existing natural gas pipeline, crossing the land of 49 tracts in DeWitt County.
Only three lawsuits have gone all the way through the condemnation process, but the company started condemnation proceedings against the owners of 14 tracts the pipeline will cross in DeWitt County.
Kinder Morgan representatives filed most of these claims in mid-August.
In fact, a flurry of activity happened in the district clerk's office that month. A new law went into effect Sept. 1 changing how pipeline companies have to deal with landowners. The law requires the company to make good-faith offers to landowners before filing a lawsuit and gives landowners more time to respond to the pipeline company offers.
Larry Pierce, a spokesman for Kinder Morgan, said the company uses eminent domain rights only after all reasonable efforts have been made to make a deal with the landowner.
Despite having a reputation for rough tactics, Kinder Morgan hasn't filed as many condemnation proceedings as other companies in the area. Both ETC and Enterprise Pipeline have filed more than 40 eminent domain claims in DeWitt County to make way for their respective lines.
It is Kinder Morgan's approach to making deals with landowners that singles them out.
The same pipeline now being laid in the Gipses' property will be put into Ed Southern's land in the coming days in Cuero. The line was mapped to barrel straight through a grove of live oaks on the retired Navy man's property. Southern knew he was dealing with a tough company - "Do you know what eminent domain is?" were the first words out of the Kinder Morgan landman's mouth when they met to negotiate - and he couldn't afford a legal battle to keep the pipeline off his land. But he decided to fight to save some of his trees and Kinder Morgan rerouted the line to spare some trees after Southern's story appeared in the Victoria Advocate.
Pierce declined to comment on either Southern or the Gipses' condemnation proceedings.
When it comes down to it, and the legal paperwork is in their hands, most landowners choose to settle out of court. Choosing to fight is a difficult, time-consuming and expensive endeavor.
"For every Jimmy Gips there is who chooses to fight them, there are 50 landowners who don't," Sheppard said.
THE LAW OF THE LAND (AND WHICH WAY IT LEANS)
The law in Texas leans toward oil and gas interests, Sheppard said.
"The Supreme Court of Texas has not rendered an opinion contrary to the interests of oil companies in probably more than a decade, and that's a source of much discussion and debate within the legal community," Sheppard said, leaning forward in his leather desk chair to make the point. "I don't think we have a Supreme Court that looks out for the interests of landowners."
Decades ago when conservative Democrats held political power in Texas, the state supreme court routinely ruled in favor of landowners rights. That changed about 20 years ago when corporate energy companies stepped up and shifted the court's focus. The justices to the state's High Court are elected to their seats, and oil companies started pouring money into election coffers.
The companies know their power. During condemnation proceedings, companies will simply appeal the case all the way to the state Supreme Court in Austin, certain in the knowledge that the court will side with them, Sheppard said.
The O'Connor vs. Exxon case is a good recent example.
T. Michael O'Connor, the Victoria County sheriff, was part of one of the more recent battles duked out between oil companies and landowners. In the early 1990s, Exxon ended a lease on the O'Connor family ranch in Refugio County. But before the company left, someone trashed the wells, throwing enough junk down the holes that when another company tried to reopen the wells a few years later, they were unusable.
The O'Connor family embarked on an 18-year legal odyssey. Court after court ruled in their favor. Each time Exxon appealed the ruling. Finally, the case was heard by the state Supreme Court. After delaying their ruling for two years, the court sided with Exxon in 2009.
Kinder Morgan filed a lawsuit against Kathy Gips in July. According to eminent domain law, once condemnation proceedings have begun, there's no going back for the landowner, aside from striking a deal with the company outside of court. The land will be taken one way or another. The only question is how much the land is worth.
The district judges appointed three special commissioners, all local landowners, to decide the value of the Gipses' land: John Schlinger, of Yoakum, Ron Ledbetter, and Jim Mann, both of Cuero.
On a hot morning in September, they met at the district court annex, a small squat building across the street from the elegant red brick of the DeWitt County Courthouse. The commissioners sat on one side of the table while Kinder Morgan representatives, their lawyer, the Gipses and Sheppard pulled chairs up to the other side.
By the time the commissioners asked to be alone to discuss what they'd heard, the sun was high overhead.
The Gipses were hopeful. They felt local landowners would understand where they were coming from, what the land that has been in their family for generations was worth.
After an hour, the commissioners called everyone back to announce their decision. They agreed with the Gipses; the amount Kinder Morgan had offered to pay wasn't enough. They ordered Kinder Morgan to pay the Gipses $42.50 a foot for the easement.
The couple left the courthouse smiling. It seemed the fight was over.
Then Kinder Morgan appealed the decision to district court.
The Gipses sighed, met with Sheppard, and prepared to continue the fight. They didn't want to go to court, Kathy Gips said. They sent another offer to the company, trying to settle the issue, sign a contract and be done with it.
Kinder Morgan sent back a brief reply, declining the offer.
Then the company cut the barbed wire fence on the property and started planning for the pipeline.
"Land ownership is sacred in Texas. You don't mess with somebody else's property unless you want to take your life in your hands," Sheppard said, shaking his head.
POWER OF THE PUBLIC GOOD
In early December, the Gipses got a notice that Kinder Morgan had paid a bond allowing the company to continue pipeline construction on their land. At first they didn't believe it, that a company could get the power to come on their property while they were still in the middle of a legal dispute.
Jimmy Gips drove out that day, stepped from his truck and asked the men what they were doing on his land. Workmen were staking the easement to designate where the pipeline would be laid.
He tried to stay calm, telling them the issue was still in litigation, that nothing had been decided yet, and they needed to leave his property. The men were polite and packed up and left.
But they came back. One month later, workmen clipped the barbed-wire fence and started bulldozing the property.
Gips drove out again and found a Kinder Morgan landman on the site. Sharp words were exchanged, but the Kinder Morgan pipeline continued to be built.
Once, cutting a fence in Texas was a felony, but Kinder Morgan had eminent domain. They had the power to be on the land, and, suddenly, Jimmy realized the hard truth - there was nothing he nor his wife could do about it.
OTHER EXPERIENCES
The Gipses' experiences with most other companies have been good. Hawk Field Services, a subsidiary of Petrohawk, put in a pipeline on that same stretch of land last year. While the company was putting the line in, one of the Gipses' cattle escaped from the pasture. The workmen tried to get the heifer back into the pasture, but the frantic animal ran, terrified. They finally maneuvered her back into the fenced area, but she had run too hard and dropped dead a few hours later. The landman called Jimmy Gips to apologize. Their contract with the company didn't have any requirements about the cattle, but the man insisted on paying for the loss. Gips donated the $1,500 Petrohawk paid him to St. Michael's Catholic School; Petrohawk then matched his donation.
"They stepped up and did the right thing, even though, legally, they didn't have to," Jimmy Gips said.
WHY THEY FIGHT
The Gipses stood on the roadside, watching the men work. The mint green steel hulls of the line already had been delivered to the site and would be in the ground in a matter of days.
Because the Gipses are still in a legal dispute with Kinder Morgan, they don't have a contract written by Sheppard to protect them. Unlike the other lines on their place, this one will be buried 36 inches, instead of the 48 inches they prefer.
A red pickup motored by them slowly, heading to the pipeline site. The workers inside looked down, avoiding Jimmy Gips' eyes.
"Tree killers!" Jimmy Gips called merrily, with a wave of his hand. "I like to have fun with them. The problem is they just don't get my sense of humor."
Back at their office in Cuero, Kathy Gips hauled out a manila folder, thick with papers.
They have dealt with pipeline companies before - already two pipelines are buried on one side of the pasture and three on the other side across the road. They also have leased their mineral rights, and a rig on the horizon will pay them royalties when the oil starts flowing.
She keeps track of everything. Every phone call, every conversation and every bit of legal paperwork that is involved in these deals ends up in one of these folders.
Kathy Gips paused for a moment and stared down at the papers in her hands.
They never wanted to be noticed or known. It wasn't their goal to become crusaders. But now they are taking on the largest pipeline company in America.
The next step will be a trial in district court. The case already is on the docket, and Sheppard expects to be representing the Gipses sometime this year. If either side chooses to appeal, the case will go to the 13th Court of Appeals in Corpus Christi. If there is an appeal of that court's ruling, it'll be in the hands of the state Supreme Court, if the justices choose to hear it.
"We won't make any money in this deal. We're probably going to come out losing money on this thing, but it's what we have to do," Jimmy Gips said.
Kathy Gips nodded.
"If we back down from this, what are our kids going to say? If you're going to stand for something, you've got to stand to the end, and that's what we're doing," she said. "This could drag on for years. We could be 100 years old and still be dealing with Kinder Morgan, but it's the right thing to do."
History of private investment in roads not the same thing as today's hybrid
To compare a truly private road done in the 1790s with today's public private partnership hybrids that exploit the governmental power of eminent domain, that heist massive sums of public money to subsidize private profits, that put the toll tax rate in the hands of private corporations, that include non-compete provisions that prohibit or penalize the expansion of free routes surrounding the privatized toll roads, and that guarantee profits at taxpayers' expense, just isn't a valid argument in favor of road privatization. The two are NOT the same, the later has already required taxpayer bailouts (South Bay Expressway in San Diego).
_____________________________________________________________________
Friday, 02 March 2012 00:01
Proposed Red Line funding model not a new concept
Written by Andrew Warfield
Lake Norman Citizen.com
First public infrastructure financed by private investors in the United States began in 1792. The Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike lasted more than 100 years.
In a country suffering economic hardship and without the funds to invest in infrastructure, the government turns to the private sector to help pay for road and railroad projects.
Sound familiar? Sure, but the first recorded public-private partnership (or P3, as local commuter rail proponents refer to it) began in 1792, when the nation's first turnpike, the Philadelphia and Lancaster Turnpike, was chartered in Pennsylvania. A new nation had no money to build infrastructure, so the first long-distance broken-stone-and-gravel surface was built, opening the territory northwest of the Ohio River.
The private owner of the road was repaid from tolls. The road literally was blocked by wooden gates, or "pikes," that would be "turned" to open the road after the tolls were paid. Thus the term, "turnpike."
The tollgates were located about every seven miles of the 62-mile road. The turnpike remained in use until the early 1900s.
"Early in the United States, the country didn't have money and relied on the private sector to build infrastructure, including roads and railroads," said Patrick DeCorla-Souza of the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Program Delivery, during an online presentation about P3 projects Feb. 16. The presentation was viewed in the Rotunda at Huntersville Town Center, as well as in other locations, by town planners, elected officials and others studying the Red Line Regional Rail Project proposal.
As discussions about the proposal have continued through the first 90 days of 2012, P3 has emerged as the likely scenario through which the project, if approved by all stakeholders along the Charlotte-to-Mooresville corridor, could be built. A combination of state funding and local transit tax money, along with private investment — repaid by special assessment district fees and tax-increment financing — would fund the estimated $452 million to upfit the track, purchase trains, build passenger stations and complete related road improvements along the 25-mile commuter and freight rail project.
It's a term that will be used more frequently here as well. Studies are currently under way to employ the P3 model for the widening of I-77, and a form of P3 is being used for the completion of I-485. In that project, the contractors are actually financing the project for the state, with the promise of repayment plus interest when the funds were originally scheduled to be available. This allowed the project to move up years on the calendar rather than waiting for the state's funding schedule.
'Infinitely financeable'
Among other meetings — and set against the backdrop of a recent letter from Norfolk Southern Railroad outlining its concerns with the project, which would utilize its rail bed — those discussions continued on Thursday, Feb. 23, with a P3 workshop at Huntersville Town Hall. At that meeting, Mark Briggs of Parsons Brinckerhoff, a consultant to the North Carolina Department of Transportation, produced a list of potential private entities from which he expected proposals to be generated if the project were to move forward. He also introduced executives from international investment firm Guggenheim Securities to explain why the industrial revenue bonds to finance the half of the capital expenses of the project not potentially covered by the state and Charlotte Area Transit System will be an easy sell.
"These companies specialize in public-private partnerships and they are worth many times more than what they would invest in this project," Briggs said by telephone from his California office on the Monday before that workshop. A complete list of these firms follows at the end of this story.
Dan Gangwish of Guggenheim told the group last Thursday that he has overseen some $5 billion worth of P3 investments during his career, and he has "seen a lot."
"It's very clear this financing works well with the state backstop," said Gangwish, adding that private investors — which typically invest in rail infrastructure in chunks of at least $10 million to $20 million — can expect a return of more than four percent. "This is infinitely financeable."
The investment and project delivery firms represent the modern-day cream of a centuries-old P3 crop, a model that has gained favor in the past two decades as some regions of the country began to shift away from only publicly financed infrastructure development.
With not enough money from local transit tax dollars to fund the Blue Line Extension light rail project from downtown Charlotte to University City and the Red Line Commuter Rail — and with the Red Line not qualifying for any federal dollars — NCDOT officials, interested in expanding the state's freight movement capacity, re-tooled and repackaged the Red Line, complete with the new, and yet centuries-old, methodology for paying for it.
Private equity, public rail
Since formally unveiling the proposal in December and scheduling a 180-day time frame for meeting, vetting, refining and completing what must be a unanimously approved business and financing plan among a number of governmental jurisdictions and agencies, there have been a number of issues raised.
Among the most controversial of those issues is whether smaller commercial property owners within the special assessment districts will see a return worthy of the increased taxes they would pay, and whether that district should be expanded to include more revenue-generating properties farther from the tracks. The private investment would be repaid by a combination of special assessments upwards of 75 cents per $100 valuation for commercial properties within the unified benefits district along the corridor, and on tax increment financing on 75 percent of the improved value of developed or redeveloped property.
Meanwhile, the NCDOT continues its vetting process and necessary talks must continue with the owner of the tracks on which the Red Line would run, Norfolk Southern.
Central to all that talk is just what form the construction, operations and maintenance might take. In recent weeks, talk of design/build/finance/operate/maintain (DFBOM) has been prevalent, whereby a single entity or a team would take on the whole project and be responsible for coming in on time and within budget.
"Exactly what form of delivery the project takes is still under development, but I would imagine it would be some sort of hybrid," said Briggs by telephone. "Typically you get a team that represents all four (disciplines) of those who come in with a unified plan. So far, in places we have taken these types of projects, we have had at least three teams of bidders who have come in and looked at these projects."
Those "teams" are typically made up of concessionnaires/contractors, equity fund investment firms, operators and vehicle (train car) manufacturers. They form consortiums to assemble their bid and, if awarded, run the project from start through delivery of the product.
"We want to be in a position if we can structure (the P3 contract) in such a way that they have to build it, buy the rolling stock and get (the rail corridor) tested and certified before they get paid a penny," said Briggs. "How this agreement gets structured is partially what makes best sense in terms of financing, because if the state provides the backstop, we will get very good interest rates."
The P3 approach, DeCorla-Souza said during his prior presentation, is usually faster and more efficient than the traditional public sector process because, while government-run projects must accept the lowest qualifying bid for a project, a P3 approach can secure the "best suited" vendor for its various aspects. An additional benefit, he said, is that all financial risk is borne by the private sector in a P3 project.
But that doesn't mean, he said, that the public sector can wash its hands of the Red Line. "The public sector must make sure the project is performing to standards, but the P3 model reduces the amount of oversight the public sector has to do and has to be involved with," said DeCorla-Souza.
The oft-repeated question regarding cost overruns and who bears that responsibility was asked again last Thursday, this time by Davidson Commissioner Laurie Venzon. "This is a legitimate concern," replied Briggs, adding that liability for extra costs are borne by the P3 team. "It is (their) risk to build it, buy the rolling stock, etc., and only when that happens do you get an availability payment. The main reason for a P3 approach is you have to put that risk on the private sector side instead of the public side because there are too many examples of cost overruns (in government-run infrastructure projects)."
So why would private investors become involved in building government-owned infrastructure? They wouldn't, Briggs and others have stated, unless they knew they could deliver the project on budget and earn a profit.
"Private concessionnaires are looking for a return on investment that is long-term, stable and predictable, and has a moderate risk," said DeCorla-Souza.
But, he added, P3s are not easy. "A lot of groundwork is required before you can secure a P3 partnership," DeCorla-Souza said.
Red Line proponents can certainly attest to that.
P3 players
Global companies that typically become involved in P3 public infrastructure projects.
Concessionnaires/Contractors
• ACS/Hochtief/Flatiron
• Acciona
• Balfour Beatty
• Bechtel
• Bouygues
• Fluor
• GlovalVia
• Kiewit
• SNC Lavalin
• Skanska
• Vinci
Equity Funds
• InfraRed
• Laing
• Macquarie
• Meridiam
• Uberior (Lloyds Bank)
Operators
• ACI
• Herzog
• National Express
• Serco
• Stagecoach
• Veolia
Vehicle Manufacturers
• Alstom
• Ansaldo/Breda
• Bombardier
• CAF
• Kawasaki
• Siemens
• Rotem/Hyundai
— Source: Parsons Brinckerhoff
Ranchers rise-up against Keystone pipeline
Link to article here.
Property rights is still the big 10,000 pound gorilla when it comes to the Keystone pipeline. Trampling on landowners using eminent domain as a club to force property owners to settle to terms unfavorable to them and their livelihoods is un-American. BTW, county records in Texas show that TransCanada has nearly 90 eminent domain proceedings RIGHT NOW in Texas, not 19 as this article states. That's like averaging one eminent domain condemnation for every 3-4 miles of proposed pipeline. This isn't a few "hold outs," it's eminent domain abuse by a foreign company for its own private profits, not a genuine public use.
Ranchers Tell Keystone: Not Under My Backyard
By David Mildenberg and Jim Efstathiou Jr. on March 08, 2012
Oil has put bread on Eleanor Fairchild’s table in Wood County, Tex., for more than 50 years. Her late husband was a geologist who worked on exploration for different energy companies, and was part of a team that discovered oil in Yemen in the 1980s. That doesn’t mean she welcomed a TransCanada (TRP) worker who appeared on her doorstep in March 2009. The company wanted to run nearly a mile of its 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline across Fairchild’s 350-acre farm 90 miles east of Dallas, the representative explained, and was willing to pay her $43,000 for an easement on five acres. Fairchild pondered the offer for several weeks. She says the company upped it to $60,000, but “they were really pushy, and that doesn’t go over well with me,” Fairchild says. “It’s my land.”
TransCanada announced it will soon reapply for the federal permit it needs to build a northern portion of Keystone, from Hardisty, Alberta, to Steele City, Neb.; the Obama administration denied its first application in January. The southern leg running from Cushing, Okla., to the Texas coast doesn’t require Washington to sign off because it doesn’t cross an international border; the company plans to start work on that leg in June. Another force delaying TransCanada from breaking ground: The company needs rights of way on about 2,150 properties in five states.
Along the route a handful of landowners refuse to grant those easements. They’re fighting the company’s efforts to seize land using state eminent-domain laws, which allow a business to seek court approval to take over private property as long as it’s for public use and the owner is compensated. “Most of the landowners already have pipelines on their land, so they aren’t against pipelines,” says Roberta Colkin, a city council member in Gallatin, Tex., who’s organized a group that’s fighting the project. “But they’re upset about being bullied by TransCanada.”
Terry Cunha, a spokesman for the company, says: “We’re listening to the needs of the landowners, trying to find out what we can achieve together, and also providing them with the full market value of their property in obtaining the easements.” He points out that TransCanada has successfully negotiated all but 19 of the 1,200 easements it sought in Oklahoma and Texas.
'I've never considered myself a bunny hugger'—John Harter'I've never considered myself a bunny hugger'—John Harter
TransCanada staff began visiting landowners four years ago, trying to strike deals and avoid court battles. That didn’t work with John Harter in Winner, S.D. The rancher says TransCanada offered him a one-time payment of $13,300 to snake the line across a half-mile of his 280-acre cattle pasture. Harter demanded an additional $70,000 annually to compensate for the fact that he wouldn’t be able to graze his herd on the land for several years. The company refused his request and instead filed a lawsuit to seize the land through eminent domain, arguing the access to Harter’s land is worth just over $6,000. “They’re doing it with no regard to human life, let alone the earth,” complains Harter, whose case will be heard by a state court in June. “I’ve never considered myself a bunny hugger, but I guess if that’s what I’ve got to be called now, I’m OK with it.” Says Cunha: “Eminent domain is allowing us to obtain the easement and compensate the landowner.”
The Keystone pipeline would be buried three feet underground, and environmental activists worry that leaks would taint water sources along the route. David Daniel, a carpenter who lives near Winnsboro, Tex., wishes he’d asked more questions about that possibility before accepting almost $14,000 from TransCanada in 2010 for an easement across 20 acres of his land. Daniel says he felt pressured into the deal: “TransCanada said this is our final offer; otherwise we’ll take you to court.”
Montana landowners have banded together to try negotiating better terms for the 217 easements TransCanada is seeking. The state, which requires pipeline builders to obtain a permit prior to construction, also has conditions it wants TransCanada to meet. “The idea is that we can allow certain development-type activities but still try to reduce the environmental effects,” says Greg Hallsten, an official at the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. The agency is “getting close” to making a decision on the permit, Hallsten says.
In Texas, Fairchild says her lawyers have advised her to wait for TransCanada to break ground before deciding whether to fight the company if it tries to come onto her land. She knows a resolution “could take years,” she says. “Some of my neighbors who have signed with TransCanada are now against the pipeline too, but some of them work in the oil business, and they can’t fight it like I can.”
The bottom line: TransCanada must still persuade 19 landowners to let it build the southern leg of its Keystone pipeline in Oklahoma and Texas.
Senate punts on long-term fix to federal highway program
By Terri Hall
March 19, 2012
With the next continuing resolution for the federal highway program coming to an end March 31, lawmakers in the nation’s Capitol have been scrambling to address systemic shortfalls in the Federal Highway Trust Fund before they run out of time. Though making some structural changes to consolidate programs, the U.S. Senate chose to kick the can down the road once more, passing a short-term extension bill, S 1813 also referred to as MAP-21, last week.
Meanwhile John Mica (R-FL), Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure has been pushing for a 5 year bill and a more long-term solution, but has struggled to gain the votes necessary for passage. They have until March 31 to either pass the House bill or take up the Senate bill and, in either scenario, they’ll need to work out the differences in conference at lightning speed.
Both versions would increase -- by nearly ten times -- the borrowing of money we don’t have from the Federal Reserve to loan to states through the TIFIA program. TIFIA loans gets doled out almost exclusively to private corporations in contracts called public private partnerships (or P3s) in order to federally subsidize an unaccountable toll road boom across the country. The first TIFIA loan went to a private corporation in a P3, and the project went bankrupt less than three years after the ill-conceived toll road opened, forcing the taxpayers to write-down nearly $80 million.
Most notable in the Senate version are two provisions authored by Senator Jeff Bingaman (D - NM). One limits the tax breaks for the private corporations in these controversial P3s, and the other reduces the amount of federal dollars a state receives if the state chooses to sell-off the public’s highways to private toll operators using P3s. Bingaman’s goal is to remove incentives for states to turn sovereign public highways into unaccountable cash cows in the hands of private corporations.
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British Prime Minister wants to sell-off roads to China
David Cameron unveils plan to sell off the roads
Sovereign wealth funds to be allowed to lease motorways in England, says prime minister
Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent
The Guardian, Sunday 18 March 2012
David Cameron: 'We need to look at innovative approaches to the funding of our roads – to increase investment to reduce congestion.' Photograph: Mike Segar/AP
David Cameron will clear the way for a multibillion-pound semi-privatisation of trunk roads and motorways as he announces plans to allow sovereign wealth funds from countries such as China to lease roads in England.
Just 48 hours before the budget, the prime minister will give a speech calling for radical action to improve Britain's infrastructure, which is falling behind those of key competitors in Europe.
In his most eye-catching proposal, Cameron will announce that the Treasury and Department for Transport are to carry out a feasibility study looking at using private-sector funds to improve and maintain trunk roads and motorways.
The prime minister's plan, modelled on the funding of the mains water and sewage network, would see sovereign wealth funds and pension funds given the right to lease roads over a long period. They would be set a series of targets to, for example, reduce congestion and carry out improvements. George Osborne recently travelled to China to persuade the world's largest fiscal-surplus country to invest in Britain's infrastructure.
If the road companies met the targets they would receive a proportion of the vehicle excise duty, which currently all goes to the Treasury. This would be seen as a particularly radical step because it would be a form of hypothecation – allowing a stream of revenue to be directed at a particular project. The Treasury normally resists this because it likes to keep control of prioritising spending across government.
But Cameron, who is fully supported by the chancellor, will make clear that the poor state of Britain's infrastructure and its public finances means that bold steps have to be taken.
There will be no tolls on the existing road network. But if the road companies create new capacity – by adding lanes to existing roads or building new roads altogether – then they would be entitled to charge for their use.
The prime minister will say: "We need to look at innovative approaches to the funding of our national roads – to increase investment to reduce congestion. Road tolling is one option, but we are only considering this for new, not existing, capacity. For example, we're looking at how improvements to the A14 could be part-funded through tolling.
"But we now need to be more ambitious. Why is it that other infrastructure – for example water – is funded by private-sector capital through privately owned, independently regulated utilities, but roads in Britain call on the public finances for funding?
"We need to look urgently at the options for getting large-scale private investment into the national roads network – from sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and other investors. That's why I have asked the Department for Transport and the Treasury to carry out a feasibility study of new ownership and financing models for the national roads system and to report progress to me in the autumn."
The bankers NM Rothschild suggested in a report in 2010 that privatising the road network could raise £100bn. Government sources said the scheme proposed by Cameron would raise far less because he plans to lease out trunk roads and motorways, rather than embarking on a full-scale sell-off, as NM Rothschild suggested.
The Cameron scheme would see a regulator for roads established along the lines of Ofwat, which oversees water and sewerage providers. Government sources were joking that they would have to think of a better name than Ofroad.
The water regulator carries out five-year reviews for companies that provide water and sewerage services.
This has allowed companies to carry out investments that have, according to government sources, vastly improved the water infrastructure. The announcement is designed to show that even in straitened economic times the government is committed to pressing ahead with radical plans to promote economic growth. Osborne has little room for manoeuvre in his budget, though it is expected that the independent Office for Budget Responsibility might signal a modest improvement in its growth targets.
Osborne confirmed on Sunday that the main points of the budget were agreed by the "quad" group of ministers – the chancellor, the prime minister, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander – last Monday. It is understood that the chancellor will announce the scrapping of the 50p top rate of tax for people earning above £150,000. But he will balance that by saying that he hopes to ease the burden of low-income earners by moving more rapidly to raise the tax allowance to £10,000. This target, which was a key Lib Dem pledge in its manifesto for the last general election, was meant to have been reached by April 2015. It is understood that the chancellor now hopes to achieve this a year early.
The prime minister will make clear that his focus remains in promoting growth as he sweeps aside objections from the National Trust and the Daily Telegraph to press ahead with major infrastructure projects that would require reforms to Britain's planning laws.
Cameron will say: "The truth is, we are falling behind … our competitors. And falling behind the great, world-beating, pioneering tradition set by those who came before us. There is now an urgent need to repair the decades-long degradation of our national infrastructure and to build for the future with as much confidence and ambition as the Victorians once did.
"Infrastructure matters because it is the magic ingredient in so much of modern life. It is not secondary to other, more high profile elements of economic strategy. It affects the competitiveness of every business in the country; it is the invisible thread that ties our prosperity together. It gets power to our lights, water to our taps, workers to their jobs, and food to our shops. It enables factories, offices, warehouses, workshops to function, to trade, to grow.
"But infrastructure isn't just about business. It's not just about big, high-profile projects. It is an all-pervasive force in society too. It's the network that powers smart phones, allows us to log on to Facebook, to travel, to live the lives we choose. It is the platform for active citizenship. And its value lie in its ability to make things possible tomorrow that we cannot even begin to imagine today. If our infrastructure is second-rate, then our country will be too. We used to understand this in Britain."
The shadow transport secretary, Maria Eagle, said: "Motorists already suffering from record fuel prices now face a road charging free-for-all, adding to the cost of living crisis facing households up and down the country.
Instead of easing the burden on drivers and boosting our stalled economy through a temporary cut in VAT, ministers look set to let private companies take over the strategic road network and charge drivers for access.
"These proposals risk simply driving traffic on to local roads, increasing congestion and emissions while yet again setting back efforts to improve safety.
"Ministers seem to be intent on repeating the mistakes of rail privatisation, which was supposed to lead to cheaper fares and lower costs but has instead given powerful vested interests the chance to rip off passengers while increasing the cost to the taxpayer.
"Motorists now seem set to be in the firing line for the next phase of the Tories' ideologically driven rip off culture.
"This budget is increasingly looking like a series of desperate acts to divert attention from the government's failure to set out a coherent plan for jobs and growth."
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
U.S. Senate passes two year, stop-gap highway bill
March 14, 2012
Senate Passes 2-Year Transportation Bill
By JONATHAN WEISMAN
WASHINGTON — The Senate easily approved a two-year, $109 billion transportation and infrastructure bill on Wednesday, putting pressure on House Republicans to set aside their stalled version and pass the Senate’s before the federal highway trust fund expires at the end of the month.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, extolled the measure, passed on a bipartisan vote of 74 to 22, as “a jobs bill in the true sense of the word.”
“I hope the House will take this up and not listen to this shrill voice that makes up so much of the Republican caucus in the House,” he said.
But the nearly three million jobs expected to be “saved or created” by the measure largely come from construction jobs that stand to be lost if federally financed projects grind to a halt on April 1, when money from the highway trust fund could no longer be used.
That deadline appears to be weighing heavily on House Republicans, who initially had wanted to use their measure to change federal transportation policy fundamentally by linking infrastructure spending to the expansion of oil drilling from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to the outer continental shelf off the East Coast.
The five-year House proposal was stymied by a coalition of opponents in both parties, and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, one of its initial backers, has all but abandoned it.
“As the speaker said, the plan as it stands right now is to let the Senate pass a bill and take up something that looks like it,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Mr. Boehner, “unless the House coalesces around a better alternative, which we are actively pursuing.”
The Senate bill, written by one of the chamber’s most liberal Democrats, Senator Barbara Boxer of California, and one of its most conservative Republicans, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, consolidates 196 federal transportation programs to about a dozen, while giving more flexibility to the states to decide transportation priorities. But it largely keeps the scope of federal highway, transit and other surface transportation projects intact. Senators kept the duration of the bill short, to two years, because of the difficulty in paying for its programs as gasoline tax revenues slide.
President Obama, as well as highway and transit advocates, had pressed for a big, upfront increase in infrastructure spending to lift the economy and address the nation’s aging roads and bridges. But considering that House Republicans last year were considering a 35 percent cut to transportation spending, level funding may have been the best that advocates could hope for, said Rob Healy, vice president for government affairs at the American Public Transportation Association.
Rather than raising the gas tax, as many transportation advocates suggest, the Senate jury-rigged the bill with an array of revenue provisions, tapping a trust fund established to clean up leaking underground storage tanks and adjusting the way pension fund contributions and liabilities are calculated.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a watchdog group, criticized the use of 10 years of revenue from such provisions to pay for a two-year transportation bill.
“That’s kind of how Congress is approaching every problem,” cobbling together short-term fixes without addressing long-term problems, said Jeff Shoaf, head of Congressional relations for the Associated General Contractors of America, which nonetheless strongly supported the bill.
Mr. Shoaf said the legislation would spur hiring in the construction industry, where unemployment hit 17.1 percent in February. With infrastructure spending stable for two years, construction firms should begin buying equipment and hiring permanent workers, he said.
“It’s not as long as we would like, but in aggregate the fact that we’re talking about a transportation bill at all is positive,” said Sean McNally, spokesman for the American Trucking Associations.
Executive Order would allow govt takeover of all civil transportation
By Lori Stacey, DC Conservative Examiner
March 18, 2012
While many of us had been sounding the alarm for years regarding previous federal laws and Presidential Directives that laid out the groundwork for complete federal control over all resources, industries, property and even human capital, most did not even look at the actual, official documentation available for the world to see. The time for continuing to dismiss the facts by resorting to naive, childish and practically brainwashed charges of supposed false "conspiracy theories" is long overdue.
All Americans need to read and dissect the latest Executive Order signed and published by Obama on Friday evening March 16th, 2012. It is stated to relate to the Defense Production Act of 1950 and Section 301 of Title 3, USC.
To add to your reading, there are 3 other Executive Orders that I highlighted in an article back in January of 2010. The implementation of 1 of them was the focus of another article published in March of 2010 naming the newly appointed 10 "federal" Regional Governors of the United States.
This latest Executive Order called the "National Defense Resources Preparedness" is alarming when combined with a Presidential Directive signed by President George W. Bush during his presidency. This new order seems to be an expansion of the 1950 Act which now appears to include "peacetime" application. Its language implies an actual implementation or enactment giving more explicit detail.
To help understand what has been rapidly evolving via our executive branch, Dr. Jerome Corsi was in the national media trying to explain the dangers of Bush's directive PD51 previously and the video recording of one of those interviews can be found here.
Basically, all industries and natural resources in our country will be directed for the purpose of national defense and under the direction of the executive branch via several federal agencies. To grasp the implications of this, one must recognize the resemblance to communist regimes in which all activities and efforts exist for the purpose of the good of "the state" and under its complete control and direction. There is no more sugar-coating left. Call it Communism, Socialism, Fascism, they are all basically just variations of the same exact quest for complete domination over "We The People" and our activities.
The only peaceful resolution left maybe very hard to achieve due to the apparent state of possible and easily manipulated election results. We must not continue to be fooled by slick politicians. The choice is clear that the next President must be someone that intends to return rightful power back to Congress, our States and We The People. Any candidate whose voting record and promises are not in strict adherence to the US Constitution will only continue to bring us further down the same primrose path full of thorns.
To illustrate an example of the vast scope of control we are facing, in section (4) below the term "civil transportation" is defined in (a) below. Also, for those fearing the possible return of the draft, there is a provision in this order that seems to relate to that becoming a real possibility as well.
The timing of this executive order is very alarming, especially given the drumbeats calling for a war with Iran which could easily turn into a WWIII scenario.
(a) "Civil transportation" includes movement of persons and property by all modes of transportation in interstate, intrastate, or foreign commerce within the United States, its territories and possessions, and the District of Columbia, and related public storage and warehousing, ports, services, equipment and facilities, such as transportation carrier shop and repair facilities. "Civil transportation" also shall include direction, control, and coordination of civil transportation capacity regardless of ownership. "Civil transportation" shall not include transportation owned or controlled by the Department of Defense, use of petroleum and gas pipelines, and coal slurry pipelines used only to supply energy production facilities directly.
Here is another excerpt from this new executive order:
Sec. 201. Priorities and Allocations Authorities. (a) The authority of the President conferred by section 101 of the Act, 50 U.S.C. App. 2071, to require acceptance and priority performance of contracts or orders (other than contracts of employment) to promote the national defense over performance of any other contracts or orders, and to allocate materials, services, and facilities as deemed necessary or appropriate to promote the national defense, is delegated to the following agency heads:
(1) the Secretary of Agriculture with respect to food resources, food resource facilities, livestock resources, veterinary resources, plant health resources, and the domestic distribution of farm equipment and commercial fertilizer;
(2) the Secretary of Energy with respect to all forms of energy;
(3) the Secretary of Health and Human Services with respect to health resources;
(4) the Secretary of Transportation with respect to all forms of civil transportation;
(5) the Secretary of Defense with respect to water resources; and
(6) the Secretary of Commerce with respect to all other materials, services, and facilities, including construction materials.
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Study commissioned to find cheap fix to I-35
Link to article here.
Want to fix I-35 congestion? Make SH 130 tollway a free road and trucks will divert over that bypass and unclog I-35 traffic through Austin. Taxpayers spent over $1 billion to build SH 130 and were told it would be the silver bullet to fix I-35 congestion. Here we are years later, and SH 130 is nearly empty, trucks still clog I-35, and nothing's changed except they're spending MORE taxpayer money to study and find cheap fixes to I-35 (and that's just an interim fix until they add managed toll lanes to I-35). Meanwhile, an ordinary Texas citizen, David Smith who lives in DFW, told the Sunset Commission, many transportation officials, and legislators back in 2008 that this weave effect of on-ramps and exits is a huge cause of congestion and suggested ways to fix it. It shouldn't take $2.25 million dollars on yet another study to conclude the same thing!
A better drive on 35? City, consultant seeking public input to relieve famously gridlocked corridor
By Patrick Beach
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 11:09 p.m. Thursday, March 15, 2012
Published: 9:53 p.m. Thursday, March 15, 2012
Imagine the slow-moving used car lot that is Interstate 35 with enhancements such as express lanes from William Cannon Drive to Cesar Chavez Street, spiffed-up interchanges at Riverside Drive and safer crossings for cyclists and pedestrians in the area.
Those are some of the ideas the city's transportation department and consultant Parsons Brinckerhoff are mulling as the I-35 Corridor Development Program continues to harvest community input in a process that began in August and will continue until year's end. The multimillion-dollar budget for the program, approved by Austin voters in 2010's Proposition 1 ballot question, got a boost of $1.25 million more from the Texas Legislature.
Having $2.25 million, City of Austin Transportation Department spokeswoman Karla Villalon said, has allowed the city to expand the analysis beyond Travis County to Williamson and Hays counties. The original 10-mile scope of the project is now 27 miles.
Most of the ideas are comparatively short- and medium-term, and could be done "without requiring significant additional right of way," according to presentation materials prepared for the program. And most of those solutions would not call for billions of dollars to widen the interstate, Villalon said.
The documents say what anyone who drives I-35 well knows: It's no fun.
In fact, it's the state's fourth most-congested corridor. Taking I-35 from U.S. 183 to Ben White Boulevard takes an average of 22 minutes during the afternoon peak, making it the 17th worst highway traffic jam in the United States.
As of January, planners had held two public meetings and 23 other forums, generating some 300 ideas.
Any good ones?
"There's been many," said Chuck Fuhs, Parsons Brinckerhoff's project manager. "And I've been doing this kind of thing for almost 40 years now in every other state."
One problem noted by some commuters, Fuhs said, is fellow motorists who use on- and offramps to "whipsaw around additional travelers."
That's right. Some of the interstate's design "actually encourages bad driver behavior," Fuhs said.
Eliminating some of the exits through the middle of town would make this harder to pull off, the consultant said.
The Federal Highway Administration offered the idea of re-striping the upper deck of 35 to gain an additional lane, a notion Fuhs likes. He said the Texas Department of Transportation is looking into whether its bridges could structurally accommodate that.
Whatever the final plan ends up looking like, what it won't be is something that gets Austin drivers down the road easier for the next 30 years. The fixes would last more like 10 years, Fuhs said. And before any modifications can begin, engineering and construction have to be funded.
"None of this is going to sound earthshaking, but little things make a great deal of difference," Fuhs said. "Intersection approach lanes make the intersection perform better. Reorienting some of the off- and on-ramps to remove some of the traffic weaves. We're also looking at widening intersections for better and safer pedestrian and bike traffic.
"If I walk the corridor, there's a whole series of little improvements that, taken together, neighborhoods and constituents would like to see," he said. "When you add it all up, you have a lot of mixing and matching to do."
Concern over gas prices could effect election
Poll: Concern over gas prices on the rise; could hurt Obama, Congress in fall
By Alicia M. Cohn - 03/09/12 11:11 AM ET
Concern over the price of fuel has taken on an increasingly important role in the campaign cycle, and a new poll shows 65 percent of Americans hold President Obama and Congress responsible for rising gas prices.
A majority of both Republicans and Democrats said they believe Obama and Congress can "do things to keep price of gas from rising," according to a new poll by Gallup.
Republicans and GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich are banking on a level of discontent about gas prices by blaming Obama for, among other things, not approving the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that they say would help supply U.S. demand for fuel. Thirty-one percent surveyed said they believe the rising price of gas is "largely beyond their control." But 85 percent of those surveyed pushed for Obama and Congress to take some immediate action to control the rising price of gas, indicating a high level of concern.
“We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that consumers aren’t hurt by [gas prices],” Obama said at a press conference on Tuesday. He scoffed at the idea that any president running for reelection would want gas prices to go up.
Gingrich, who is running his presidential campaign on a goal of $2.50-per-gallon gas, alleged Thursday night on Fox News that Obama wants gas prices to go down "only for the purposes of the election."
According to Gingrich, it is part of Obama's energy "model" to use "very high prices to force people into electric cars and into other methods of propulsion."
According to Gallup, Americans surveyed on average indicated that gas prices over $5.30 per gallon would force them to make "significant changes" in lifestyle.
The nationally conducted Gallup poll was taken by telephone on March 5 and 6. The margin of error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.
Orlando airport to nix TSA screeners
Yet TSA and the Justice Department threatened to make Texas a no-fly zone when we attempted to opt-out of the invasive pat downs and scanners in the legislature last year...
Major US Airport To Evict TSA Screeners
Orlando Sanford International could prompt stampede of other opt-outs
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
One of America’s busiest airports, Orlando Sanford International, has announced it will opt out of using TSA workers to screen passengers, a move which threatens the highly unpopular federal agency’s role in other airports across the nation.
“The president of the airport said Tuesday that he would apply again to use private operators to screen passengers, using federal standards and oversight,” reports the Miami Herald.
With Sanford International having originally been prevented by the TSA from opting out back in November 2010 when the federal agency froze the ability for airports to use their own private screeners, a law passed by the Senate last month forces the TSA to reconsider applications.
Larry Dale hinted that the move was motivated by the innumerable horror stories passengers have told of their encounters with the TSA, noting that the change was designed to provide a more “customer friendly” operation.
The agency has been slow to reissue the guidelines on the the rule change, prompting Republican Representatives John Mica of Florida, Darrell Issa of California and Jason Chaffetz of Utah to press TSA head John Pistole to implement the mandate.
Appearing at Orlando Sanford International yesterday, Mica said he had written to 200 airports advising them of the opportunity to op out of using TSA screeners.
Orlando Sanford is in the top 30 busiest airports in the world, with large numbers of takeoffs and landings.
The TSA has been keen to downplay the opportunity for airports to dispense with their screeners, fearing a mass exodus that could undermine the justification for the agency’s continued existence, especially given the fact that its reputation has been repeatedly savaged by a number of scandals.
The most recent controversy involved a viral You Tube video created by engineer Jon Corbett which demonstrated how the TSA’s body scanners were virtually useless because they are unable to detect objects carried on the side of the body carried in a pocket.
The TSA responded by threatening the media not to cover the issue while putting out a blog statement that completely failed to rebut the claims made by Corbett.
A November 2010 poll found that the TSA’s “enhanced pat downs,” some of which include touching genitalia, angered 57% of regular adult fliers.
West Yellowstone Airport in Montana has already replaced its TSA screeners with private security. Bert Mooney Airport, also in Montana, is attempting to do the same.
However, when Texas lawmakers attempted to pass a bill last year that would have outlawed invasive TSA pat downs, the feds threatened to implement a blockade that would have imposed a de facto “no fly zone” over the lone star state.
Kicking out the incompetent, criminally-inclined and abusive TSA across the nation will not only encourage millions of peeved Americans to start flying again, pumping much needed money into the travel industry, it will also create thousands of new private sector jobs.
The problem with public private partnerships
Though this article was originally published in 2009, the bulk of his points remain true today. May this be a warning to us...
The Problem with Public-Private Partnerships
Economic crisis exposes the high costs and risks of P3s
by Toby Sanger, Corina Crawley
National Office | The Monitor
April 1, 2009
If there is one thing that the current financial and economic crisis has shown, it is that the neoconservative economic model of deregulation, privatization, tax cuts, free trade and unequal growth is bankrupt. And yet, incredibly, Canadian governments and corporations are using the economic crisis to push more of the same policies: tax cuts, the sale of public assets, and, especially, more privatization through public-private partnerships (P3s).
The shifting rationales of P3s has always been highly dubious.
P3s had been used by politicians as a form of off-book accounting to make it appear as if public spending and deficits were lower than they actually were — but then public auditors forced governments to include these obligations on their books.
P3 proponents then claimed that their projects could be less expensive, more innovative, speedier, and more accountable than public service delivery — but a string of failures, delays, little transparency, and secretive deals proved these claims wrong.
Most recently, P3 advocates have acknowledged that they cost more, but they try to justify these deals by claiming that P3s transfer massive amounts of “risk” from the public sector to the private sector. By using highly questionable “value for money” accounting, they claim that the higher costs of P3s, particularly on the financing side, are offset by transferring colossal amounts of risk to the private sector.
While independent experts have criticized these deceptive rationales and faulty accounting for years, the details can be complicated. The misleading accounting practices remain, but the financial crisis has exposed the false economics of P3s in a number of different ways:
• The economic and financial crisis was caused by the same policies behind the push for public-private partnerships.
• Private financing is more costly and risky than public financing.
• The private sector is worse at managing risk than the public sector.
• Risks can never be completely transferred through P3s.
• Additional and complicated P3 requirements lengthen the process and add to delays.
This economic and financial crisis has a number of deep roots, but what propelled both the later stages of the boom and the consequent crisis was a systemic cover-up of losses, mispricing, and mismanagement of risk in the private sector.
Sub-prime mortgages were only a small part of this. On top of these and other debts, the financial industry built a web of speculation and highly leveraged securitized assets that were sold to unsuspecting buyers as solid investments. This helped to provide easy credit for a number of years, but it was only a matter of time before the financial house of cards came tumbling down.
Despite trillions of dollars provided by the taxpayers in public bailouts (and much more in accommodative actions by central banks), financial institutions around the world, including many of those behind P3 projects, continue to teeter on the brink of insolvency. It was only effective public nationalization of major banks and financial institutions in a number of countries that managed to save the world’s financial system from collapsing around the world.
In a thoroughly perverse twist, these free market economic policies led to the largest public bailouts in history and what Nobel-Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has described as a "new form of public-private partnership, one in which the public shoulders all the risk, and the private sector gets all the profit."
Public-private partnerships have fundamentally been about giving private investors and financiers high returns with low risks, at the long-term expense of taxpayers and the public. The financial backers of P3s were able to borrow capital at lower rates of interest, thanks in large part to unregulated and often fraudulent activities in financial markets. This narrowed the interest rate spread between private and public sector borrowing rates, allowing P3s to appear more financially attractive than otherwise. They were still a bad deal for taxpayers, but low private sector costs of borrowing meant that faulty accounting didn’t have to cover up as much.
These low borrowing rates for the private sector were not based on economic fundamentals or realistic calculations of risk in the private sector. Private financial institutions engaged in systemic cover-ups, miscalculations, and passing on of undisclosed risks to unsuspecting investors. The unregulated financial markets allowed financial speculation to flourish, siphoning funds away from productive investments in the real economy. As a result, the paper economy grew, but real economy stagnated. Then the whole house of cards came crashing down.
As a result, private financing costs for P3s have increased and will continue to stay relatively high, while costs of public borrowing have tumbled. This will continue to make P3s both more costly and more risky for the public.
The spread (difference between public and private sector interest rates) for short-term borrowing rates in Canada is now about 100 basis points higher than it was during the five years of easy credit. According to a recent industry report, the spreads for P3 financing have doubled, on average, compared to last year. On a typical project, this increased spread of 100 basis points would increase the cost of financing by about 10% to 15%, or by upwards of $20 million for $100 million over 30 years.
There is no foundation to the claim that the private sector is better at managing risk than the public sector. Virtually all P3s in Canada have been justified on the basis that they transfer large amounts of risk to the private sector. But a growing list shows that P3s are both more risky and more costly for the public:
• B.C. Bridges. The financing behind Partnerships B.C.'s flagship Golden Ears Bridge project came close to collapse when its financial backers almost went into default. The German government came to the rescue with a $77 billion bailout of the German-based parent of the Irish Depfa Bank. The other financial partner of this project, Dexia, also received a $9.6 billion injection from taxpayers.
• Alberta Schools. A key player behind Alberta's P3 schools project has also come close to collapse. Last year, Babcock and Brown Ltd. lost 97% of its stock value while its P3 arm, Babcock and Brown Partnerships Ltd, recently laid off 25% of its staff.
In every single project approved so far as a P3 in Ontario, the costs would have been lower through traditional procurement if they had not inflated by these calculations of the value of "risk." The calculations of risk could just as well have been pulled out of thin air – and they are not small amounts. For a number of projects, the estimates of risks transferred inflated the base project costs by over 50%. The total amount of risk supposedly transferred through projects in Ontario has now reached over $1 billion, all based on sketchy calculations. The total cost savings of traditional procurement compared to P3s for Ontario’s projects has now reached well over $500 million if these dubious calculations of risk are excluded.
Some examples of excessive costs include:
• Ontario hospitals: Ontario’s Auditor-General recently revealed that the province’s flagship P3 hospital, Brampton Civic, cost the public $200 million more than if it had been publicly financed and built directly by the province.
• East Coast Toll Roads: An estimated more than $300 million in tolls were produced on the Cobequid Pass for a deal in which private financiers put up $66 million. The Nova Scotia government is paying an effective interest rate of 10% for 30 years, twice its rate of borrowing. High fines for using adjacent roads force truckers to use the toll road.
• Universities: A P3 project at the Université de Québec à Montréal failed, doubling the cost to the public from $200 million to $400 million.
• West Coast Highways: B.C.'s Sea-to-Sky Highway will cost taxpayers $220 million more than if it had been financed and operated publicly.
Risks can never be completely transferred through P3s, because governments will always be ultimately accountable for delivering public services and infrastructure.
This responsibility is not changed by expensive and lengthy P3 agreements. If problems arise, it is the public that always has to pick up the bill at the end of the day.
If P3 operators run into problems or don't achieve expected returns, they can just walk away, leaving the public sector to pick up the tab.
• Recreation: The City of Ottawa was forced to bail out two of three of its flagship P3 recreation arena projects in 2007. Both of the parent companies were still very profitable, but wanted even higher returns.
• Water and wastewater: Hamilton's water and wastewater services had to be taken in-house after a string of owners, including an Enron subsidiary, created a financial mess of the P3, including a raw sewage spill that had to be cleaned up at public expense.
P3 programs in Canada are largely modeled on the U.K.'s "Private Finance Initiative" (PFI), which has its own spectacular failures.
Metronet, the private company that won a £30 billion, 30-year P3 deal to upgrade and maintain London's Tube network, failed and had to be taken over by the City of London's transport authority last year. The Metronet failure has already cost U.K. taxpayers an extra £2 billion (nearly $4 billion Canadian) and left Londoners with 500 subway stations in various states of disrepair for a P3 deal that was forced on their city by the central government under its PFI initiative. And this is just the beginning: costs for the City of London are already expected to grow by an additional £1 billion. Even the normally conservative Economist magazine now admits that these P3 deals now look like "complicated costly mistakes."
Other projects in the U.K., Australia,and New Zealand are in crisis or have been under call for greater oversight.
Governments are under increased pressure to speed up infrastructure investments as an important means of stimulating the economy.
The same factors that make P3s complicated and risky also mean that they usually involve significant delays and high legal and financial costs. This means they are particularly inappropriate for the type of accelerated infrastructure investments that are now required for the economy.
As the U.K. Treasury has advised: “A PFI transaction is one of the most complex commercial and financial arrangements that a procurer is likely to face. It involves negotiations with a range of commercial practitioners and financial institutions, all of whom are likely to have their own legal and financial advisors. Consequently, procurement timetables and transaction costs can be significantly in excess of those normally incurred with other procurement options."
In Vancouver, for instance, the publicly operated and financed Millennium Line rapid transit project started operation three years after the process got under way. In comparison, the P3-financed Canada Line transit project is not expected to be in service until 2009, eight years after B.C. Transit got its process started. Similarly, the Evergreen Line transit line has also been delayed until 2014, at least 10 years after approval.
The recent announcement by the British Columbia government that it has raised the threshold for projects to be considered as a public-private partnership to $50 million in order to accelerate capital investment is a clear acknowledgement that the P3 requirement delays investment, particularly for smaller projects.
* * *
Recent failures, bailouts, and excessive costs show that the risk analyses and value-for-money accounting used to justify P3s are clearly flawed and cover up the true costs and risks for the public. Governments in Canada will be forced to rescue or bail out a growing number of P3 projects in the coming years, particularly with harsh and turbulent economic conditions expecting to persist for a several years.
At the same time, private investors will put increasing pressure on governments to increase the number of P3s, since they provide them with long-run, secure, and relatively high returns. But taxpayers who subsidize these high returns should be very concerned.
The current financial and economic crisis didn't just occur because of a number of isolated failures in the financial industry. The unregulated financial markets allowed financial speculation to flourish, siphoning away funds from productive investments in the real economy. As a result, the paper economy grew, but the real economy stagnated with negative or zero rates of productivity growth during recent years.
Public-private partnerships are not just a highly questionable deal for the taxpayers; they also have a negative impact on the economy. The investment banks and funds that are now heavily promoting P3s would do more good for the economy if they returned to what should be their primary role: financing investments to boost productivity and growth in the languishing private sector economy. Smaller Canadian contractors are squeezed out of access to infrastructure contracts while international firms take public funds sunk into P3 projects out of the country.
Public services and infrastructure are best financed and delivered by the public sector. Private industry has a key part to play in its traditional role of designing and constructing public infrastructure under contract. But expanding these deals to include private financing and operations makes them much more complicated, expensive, and risky. Canadians need more public investment to rebuild our economy – but they can't afford more expensive, unaccountable, and risky public-private partnerships.
As Greg Malone puts it: “P3s ahould be called P12s — Public-Private Partnerships to Plunder the Public Purse to Pursue Policies of Peril to People and the Planet for all Posterity.”
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(Toby Sanger is Senior Economist and Corina Crawley is Senior Research Officer at the National Office of the Canadian Union of Public Employees.)
Sources and Resources
- A Matter of Time: Will the Credit Crisis Impact Canadian P3s? Daniel Roth, Managing Director Infrastructure Advisory Practice, Ernst and Young. Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships. http://www.pppcouncil.ca/pdf/matteroftime.pdf
- "Reversal of Fortune," Joseph Stiglitz, Vanity Fair, November 2008 http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/11/stiglitz200811
- Québec épongera la dette de l'UQAM, Le Devoir, Les Actualités, vendredi 10 octobre 2008, p.a1
- The Real Cost of the Sea-to-Sky P3: A Critical Review of Partnerships BC's Value for Money Assessment, Marvin Shaffer, CCPA-BC, September 2006.
- Infrastructure Ontario, Design, Build Finance, Maintain, Risk Analysis and Risk Matrix. November 2007. http://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/projects/files/DBFM%20Risk%20Analysis%20for%20Publication%20(26NOV07).pdf
- Assessing Value for Money: A guide to infrastructure Ontario’s methodology. 2007. http://www.infrastructureontario.ca/en/projects/files/VFM%20GUIDE%20WEB.pdf
- Evaluating the operation of PFI in roads and hospitals, Pam Edwards, Jean Shaoul, Anne Stafford and Lorna Arblaster.The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants Research Report # 84. London, 2004
- London’s transport mess: Holes underground, Sep 11th 2008, The Economist Print Edition http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1220949...
- Paul Gosling, Rise of the Public Services Industry, A report for Unison, September 2008.
- Coming to the crunch, by Paul Gosling. Public Finance Magazine.October 2008. http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/features_details.cfm?News_id=59033
- HM Treasury, Value for Money Assessment Guide, August 2004. p. 30
- Evergreen Line, Translink, Community Update, May 2007. http://www.translink.bc.ca/files/pdf/Evergreen_Line_Project_Update_May_2...
Eminent domain abuse Socialism for the rich
This is a terrific article on how eminent domain abuse is Socialism for the rich. It's happening all over the country every day. The latest incarnation being public private partnerships (where they sell-off public infrastructure to the highest bidder on Wall Street) and the Keystone pipeline where the Canadian company has gained the power of eminent domain.
Socialism for the rich
By Thomas Sowell
10/3/2006
Although socialism has long claimed to be for the poor, it has probably done more damage, on net balance, to the poor than to the rich. After all, the rich have enough money to leave the country if they think the socialists are going to do them any serious harm.
Some of our own rich have already had their money leave the country, to be sheltered from the higher taxes that limousine liberals say we should all pay. Meanwhile, the liberal media give them kudos for their selfless advocacy of higher taxes on higher income people, forgetting that these are not taxes on wealth.
Most of the people in the upper income brackets are not rich and do not have wealth sheltered offshore. They are typically working people who have finally reached their peak earning years after many years of far more modest incomes -- and now see much of what they have worked for siphoned off by politicians, to the accompaniment of lofty rhetoric.
The rich have learned to adapt socialist policies to their own benefit. For example, the city of Riviera Beach, Florida, is planning to demolish a working class neighborhood under its power of eminent domain, in order to prepare the way for a marina for yachts, luxury condominiums and an upscale shopping district.
What will the city of Riviera Beach get out of all this? More taxes from higher-income people, enabling local politicians to spend more money on programs to attract votes.
Meanwhile the rich get rid of lower-income folks without having to pay them the value of their homes and businesses that will be demolished. As in so many other cases, eminent domain is socialism for the rich.
Theoretically, those whose homes and businesses are demolished will get the "just compensation" to which the Constitution says they are entitled.
In reality, just announcing plans to demolish the homes in an area will immediately demolish part of their market value. Even if homeowners are compensated for whatever value remains when their homes are actually demolished -- which can be years later -- they have still been had.
For businesses, compensating them for the value of their physical assets -- which may or may not include ownership of the place where their businesses are located -- does nothing to compensate them for the often much larger value of the clientele they have built up over the years but who are now scattered to the winds by neighborhood demolition.
This game doesn't work the same way in rich neighborhoods. Not only can the rich hire big-bucks lawyers to fight city hall, why would city hall want to get rid of upscale taxpayers, who are often also big donors to political campaigns?
A very different form of socialism for the rich protects their communities from even the dangers of a free market. A whole array of laws and policies prevents outsiders from buying up property near them, even when these outsiders are ready to pay prices determined by supply and demand, rather than by eminent domain.
For example, the "open space" laws that have spread across the country to protect upscale communities represent one of the biggest collectivizations of land since the days of Josef Stalin.
Upscale residents say that they have a right to protect "our community." But not even the rich own the whole community.
They own what they paid for -- their own individual property. But they get the government to collectivize the often vastly larger surrounding property, in order to keep the unwashed masses from settling near them and spoiling their views.
Moreover, they wrap themselves in the mantle of idealism while doing this and denounce the "selfishness" of those who would stoop to building homes or apartments to house others, just to make money.
"Developer" is a cuss word to those who wax indignant in their righteous zeal to keep other people out. Why can't these money-grubbing developers just inherit money, like so many of the upscale idealists?
Meanwhile, back in the working class neighborhood in Riviera Beach, it is being defended legally by the Institute for Justice, one of the few "public interest" organizations that deserve the name.
Taking sides: KSAT-TV in San Antonio advocating toll roads
Published On: Mar 07 2012 04:21:24 PM CST
Watch Phil Lane's editorial telling taxpayers toll roads are inevitable. His basic reasoning is we can't count on the state to fund roads, so we have to do it ourselves. So the idea is to keep DUMPING hard-earned money on the steps of the Capitol in Austin and never fight to get our duly owed money back to our region. His answer is punitive, unaccountable taxation in the hands of un-elected boards to get out of congestion with gas prices at an all-time high.
We've requested equal time to rebut his editorial, we'll see if they grant it, unedited.
They ask for feedback, give it to 'em here.
Senate to debate Hutchison ban on tolling free lanes
Senate to debate Hutchison's ban on interstate tolls, but it won't stop spread of tolls on North Texas highways
By Michael Lindenberger/Reporter
Dallas Morning News
10:12 AM on Mon., Mar. 12, 2012 | Permalink
The Senate is expected to debate amendments to its version of the highway reauthorization bill later today, and one of the most watched scrums will be over two rival amendments that would deal with whether and how states can apply for permission to convert existing freeways to toll roads.
Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison wants the program currently in use that allows such conversations to end. Her amendment would ban all tolls on lanes that are currently free.
A rival amendment by Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., would make it much easier for states to win that federal permission to add tolls to existing lanes. (Politico lays out all 18 related amendments under consideration today here.)
The fight isn't expected to have immediate impact on Texas, however, despite its status as one of the country's most aggressive champions of tolls. That's because existing rules at TxDOT already prohibit converting federal highways that are now free to toll lanes.
Hutchison's amendment would simply enshrine that into law.
That's still a big step for toll road opponents, who have never trusted Gov. Rick Perry's appointees to the Texas Transportation Commission to not look for every loophole they can find to expand the toll roads in Texas.
But the reality is that the rest of the country is rushing to follow Texas' lead in expanding toll roads, not reigning them in. This amendment by Carper reflects just that.
And while some states do want to add tolls to current free lanes -- leaders in Louisville, Ky., are counting on just that to pay for a new bridge over the Ohio River, for instance -- most states have managed to add tolls to interstates without needing the kind of permission Carper wants to make easier to obtain.
They do what Texas has been doing, especially in North Texas.
LBJ Freeway, otherwise known as Interstate 635, is part of the federal system. When local and state leaders wanted to rebuild they decided they wanted to add tolls to the interstate to make it easier to pay for.
But they didn't have to ask permission under the program Hutchison wants to abolish. Instead, they simply worked out a multi-billion contracts with Cintra toll firm that requires the company to rebuild the existing lanes, with some modest improvements, and keep them free.
Nearly all of the new capacity will come from tolls on new lanes built underneath the rebuilt free lanes.
That's the approach local leaders hope will be used to reconstruct Interstate 35E to Denton, and State Highway 183 out of Irving.
The bottom line: No matter what happens to Hutchison's bill, interstates will increasingly offer a mix of toll and free lanes. And as those interstates in big cities get more and more crowded, the future is clear: Any hope drivers have of seeing a reduction in time spent stuck in traffic will be tied directly to how much spare change they have to spend.