Harris County toll roads

Almost since Harris County started collecting tolls, there has been a belief that someone somewhere promised the tolls would go away once the roads were paid for.

Well, the roads have long been paid for, at least those first roads, but the tolls are likely never going away. That’s in part because no one ever promised — really promised — they ever would.

For years there has been talk of what was said at the meetings or on flyers that have rarely, if ever, been shown. While some hold onto the legend as fact, county and toll officials have long called them misunderstandings, if not outright fabrications. There is no record that anyone with the campaign or the county said they were going to retire those bonds and end tolling when voters went to the polls.

That does not mean someone did not say it. Maybe they did. Maybe they were or were not with the campaign or the county. There is no record of everything everyone said at a community meeting and no record of any unofficial mailers that said it. The claim just is not in any ads printed at the time of the election. It is not in the coverage of either of Houston’s two competing daily newspapers prior to the election. It is not in the campaign materials.

What a review of the campaign materials and the coverage of it in 1983 will largely get you is a trip down memory lane of when the United States was debating Israel’s right to conduct retaliatory strikes and plans for the Houston-Dallas bullet train.

Campaign materials, however, do allude to an end of tolls. In 1983 flyers, supporters of the campaign noted that Dallas ended tolls on one of its roads once the bonds were paid and that state law at the time required the lifting of tolls if no bonds were outstanding.