By Isadora Vail and Tony Plohetski The Austin American Statesman The Blotter -Thursday, May 1, 2008
State Representative Mike Krusee, R- Williamson County, was swerving between lanes in his black BMW on the frontage road of U.S. 183 Wednesday night, according to officials and an arrest affidavit.
A Texas Department of Public Safety trooper arrested and charged Krusee in for driving while intoxicated. Krusee was booked into the Williamson County Jail at 11:15 p.m. Wednesday and was released at 8:55 a.m. today, officials said. His bail was set at $1,000.
Trooper Michael Scheffler wrote in the arrest affidavit that he followed Krusee down U.S. 183, after he noticed the serving, and saw that Krusse had expired registration, according to the affidavit.
After running his plates, the trooper pulled Krusee over on Black Oak Street near Jollyville, according to the affidavit.
Scheffler noticed a strong smell of alcohol and administered a field sobriety test, which Krusee failed, states the affidavit, and Krusse admitted to drinking one glass of wine.
He refused a Breathalyzer and blood test, according to the affidavit.
Neither Krusee nor his attorney, Jason Nassour, could be immediately reached for comment.
Krusee carried and passed legislation in 2003 that created something called the “driver responsibility program” to help fund the Texas Mobility Fund. That program included a number of surcharges for driving offenses, including $1,000 for a first conviction of driving while intoxicated.
Read more in the Austin American Statesman
Showing posts with label Mike Krusee. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mike Krusee. Show all posts
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Friday, August 24, 2007
Road campaign draws criticism and praise from lawmakers
By PEGGY FIKAC - Austin Bureau The Houston Chronicle - Aug. 20, 2007
Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN — The Texas Department of Transportation, which complains about chronic underfunding, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign that promotes the divisive Trans-Texas Corridor plan and toll roads.
The campaign is anticipated to cost $7 million to $9 million, according to a memo titled "Keep Texas Moving: Tolling and Trans-Texas Corridor Outreach" sent to transportation officials by Coby Chase, director of the agency's government and public affairs division.
Such use of state highway-fund dollars is drawing questions, but the department says it's an important effort to educate and engage Texans.
"It's a waste of money," said Rep. Warren Chisum, chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, "and they have no business out there trying to get public opinion to be in their favor."
The money would be better spent fixing roads, said Chisum, R-Pampa.
But Rep. Mike Krusee, House Transportation Committee chairman, said the campaign addresses lawmakers' concerns by explaining new financing methods.
"The Legislature has been beating TxDOT over the head for two years, telling them they need to explain what the Trans-Texas Corridor is and why it is necessary to the public. They've been telling TxDOT they are moving too fast — they are moving before the public and the Legislature has the chance to understand what they are doing and why," said Krusee, R-Round Rock.
If the outreach is effective, Krusee said, it could save money in the long run.
"Texas is losing money for roads by the hundreds of millions of dollars every year simply due to delay because the Legislature and the public don't understand the need to move to a new finance method. And so an expenditure of a few million dollars could literally save hundreds of millions of dollars per year," Krusee said.
The agency's budget is more than $7 billion for fiscal year 2007 and more than $8 billion for fiscal year 2008.
The Trans-Texas Corridor and toll roads have been championed by GOP Gov. Rick Perry and others as necessary in the face of congestion and gas-tax revenues that can't keep up with huge transportation needs.
But the initiative has drawn widespread criticism over the potential route and state proposals to partner with private companies to run toll roads. Lawmakers this year sought to rein in new private toll projects.
The new campaign, as outlined in the memo obtained by the Houston Chronicle, started June 1 with TV, radio, print, billboard and Internet advertising meant to push people to the Keep Texas Moving site (www.keeptexasmoving.com).
Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who fought for a moratorium on privately run toll roads, said the initiative needs a hard look.
"TxDOT is consistently telling us we have no money to build highways, yet they seem to be spending a lot of money on internal audits and also ad campaigns. That's something that the Legislature needs to look at," she said. "I don't know that we would approve any other agency to do a $7 (million) to $9 million campaign on an initiative as controversial as the Trans-Texas Corridor and tolled roads."
She added that the cost "is a lot of money, and I would hope since it's taxpayer dollars they would approach it with a balanced approach to tell the pros and the cons of toll roads and the Trans-Texas Corridor."
TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott defended the campaign. "The clearest and most-often repeated criticism of the department during the legislative session was that we needed to do a better job of engaging the public," he said. "We heard that message loud and clear, and we're acting on it."
Read more
Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN — The Texas Department of Transportation, which complains about chronic underfunding, has launched a multimillion-dollar campaign that promotes the divisive Trans-Texas Corridor plan and toll roads.
The campaign is anticipated to cost $7 million to $9 million, according to a memo titled "Keep Texas Moving: Tolling and Trans-Texas Corridor Outreach" sent to transportation officials by Coby Chase, director of the agency's government and public affairs division.
Such use of state highway-fund dollars is drawing questions, but the department says it's an important effort to educate and engage Texans.
"It's a waste of money," said Rep. Warren Chisum, chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, "and they have no business out there trying to get public opinion to be in their favor."
The money would be better spent fixing roads, said Chisum, R-Pampa.
But Rep. Mike Krusee, House Transportation Committee chairman, said the campaign addresses lawmakers' concerns by explaining new financing methods.
"The Legislature has been beating TxDOT over the head for two years, telling them they need to explain what the Trans-Texas Corridor is and why it is necessary to the public. They've been telling TxDOT they are moving too fast — they are moving before the public and the Legislature has the chance to understand what they are doing and why," said Krusee, R-Round Rock.
If the outreach is effective, Krusee said, it could save money in the long run.
"Texas is losing money for roads by the hundreds of millions of dollars every year simply due to delay because the Legislature and the public don't understand the need to move to a new finance method. And so an expenditure of a few million dollars could literally save hundreds of millions of dollars per year," Krusee said.
The agency's budget is more than $7 billion for fiscal year 2007 and more than $8 billion for fiscal year 2008.
The Trans-Texas Corridor and toll roads have been championed by GOP Gov. Rick Perry and others as necessary in the face of congestion and gas-tax revenues that can't keep up with huge transportation needs.
But the initiative has drawn widespread criticism over the potential route and state proposals to partner with private companies to run toll roads. Lawmakers this year sought to rein in new private toll projects.
The new campaign, as outlined in the memo obtained by the Houston Chronicle, started June 1 with TV, radio, print, billboard and Internet advertising meant to push people to the Keep Texas Moving site (www.keeptexasmoving.com).
Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who fought for a moratorium on privately run toll roads, said the initiative needs a hard look.
"TxDOT is consistently telling us we have no money to build highways, yet they seem to be spending a lot of money on internal audits and also ad campaigns. That's something that the Legislature needs to look at," she said. "I don't know that we would approve any other agency to do a $7 (million) to $9 million campaign on an initiative as controversial as the Trans-Texas Corridor and tolled roads."
She added that the cost "is a lot of money, and I would hope since it's taxpayer dollars they would approach it with a balanced approach to tell the pros and the cons of toll roads and the Trans-Texas Corridor."
TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott defended the campaign. "The clearest and most-often repeated criticism of the department during the legislative session was that we needed to do a better job of engaging the public," he said. "We heard that message loud and clear, and we're acting on it."
Read more
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Hold Those Tolls! Lege leaves question: How will we pay for roads?
By Larry Schooler - The Austin Chronicle - July 27, 2007
It was Dec. 16, 2004, and Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Round Rock, was sitting pretty. He was virtually a guest of honor at a meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission, across the street from his Capitol office. A little more than a year before, as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Krusee had successfully carried the behemoth House Bill 3588. Among its many and complex provisions, the bill helped smooth the way for Gov. Rick Perry to get the Texas Transportation Commission to approve early plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor. Stretching from Mexico to Oklahoma, the corridor would be a mammoth transportation project running parallel to I-35. As conceived, it would include free and tolled highway lanes, as well as rail and utility lines, and would be built and maintained by the privately held Spanish company Cintra (an international operator of toll roads and car parks) and the San Antonio-based Zachry Construction Corp.
At the Texas Transportation Commission meeting, attended by the governor himself, Krusee didn't say much. Actions spoke louder than words -- and on this day, the commission was acting on a project he had fought long and hard to convince legislators to support. By way of acknowledgment, commission Chairman Ric Williamson duly praised Krusee for his work at the Capitol. Krusee had a flight to catch, but first he took the floor for a brief stroll down memory lane.
"I started thinking about the first time that I met Ric Williamson," Krusee recalled, according to a meeting transcript. It was 1992, and Krusee had just been elected to the House; then-Rep. Williamson invited the 32-year-old Krusee to his apartment. "So I went over there, and Ric had one of his good friends over there, and that was the night I met Rick Perry, who was the ag commissioner, and we talked long into the night about accomplishing great things for Texas, about how to be a great leader for Texas. And we weren't thinking about how to be on Texas Monthly's 10 best [list] -- but you know, Ric, I think we were talking about days like this.
"And you know, governor," Krusee continued, "A little over two years ago when you made that presentation [about the Trans-Texas Corridor] in the auditorium at the Capitol, and I was in the audience, and like everybody else out there, I didn't really fully grasp what the hell you were talking about." The audience laughed.
"You do now, don't you?" asked Perry.
"I do now," Krusee replied. "And I want to congratulate you on your vision and your leadership, and the commission and your staff on your hard work, because you have made this, I think sincerely, the most historic day in transportation, not just for Texas, but for the United States since Eisenhower." With that, Krusee left the meeting.
Flash forward nearly 21/2 years -- to May 2, 2007. Chairman Krusee stood on the House floor, without a single transportation ally. Every House member present, except Krusee alone, voted in favor of HB 1892, which included a two-year moratorium on many of the public-private partnerships such as the one the Texas Department of Transportation had developed with Cintra-Zachry to build the Trans-Texas Corridor. "Who knew that trying to reduce congestion could be such a lonely fight?" wondered Coby Chase, who monitors the Legislature for TxDOT.
Perry eventually vetoed HB 1892, but a nearly identical Senate substitute, Senate Bill 792, later handily passed both the House and Senate, and Perry signed it into law. The massive bill forbids TxDOT from negotiating a tolling agreement with a private company until Sept. 1, 2009, exempting some projects already under way. Even among those exempted projects, some got swept up in the post-session, anti-privatization maelstrom. For instance, at its June meeting, the Texas Transportation Commission awarded a contract for the State Highway 121 project (in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex) to the North Texas Tollway Authority -- after initially awarding the contract to Cintra.
SB 792 also states that if a company paid TxDOT money up front for the rights to build a toll road in a particular region, TxDOT must use that money on other projects in that region. It requires TxDOT to give local tolling agencies preferential treatment over private companies by giving them free right-of-way and the right of first refusal on building toll roads. In essence, the Legislature left private companies interested in transportation on the bench for the next two years.
Politics or Policy?
So what happened? How could Rep. Krusee, four years earlier, convince all but three members of the House to approve legislation that enabled private companies to build highways, only to find that entire concept rejected out of hand this year? Not surprisingly, it depends on whom you ask.
"What happened was," Krusee said after the session, "TxDOT was going not just against the traditional rural opposition to road building but against Dallas and Houston in a turf battle over who would build the roads." In Dallas, Houston, Austin, and elsewhere, public toll-road authorities were getting outgunned by private companies like Cintra, and they weren't happy, Krusee says, so they asked their legislators to give tolling authorities right of first refusal. Krusee didn't take it personally that he seemed to be the only member of the House who wanted private companies to continue building roads. "I think it was a political vote," he said. "Members thought it was necessary to vote that way to get votes back home; they felt like they'd be criticized for voting against it."
Chase agrees with Krusee and points to the larger political context. "During this last election cycle, we had a candidate for governor; she liked to campaign against foreigners and against toll roads," Chase explained, in reference to gubernatorial candidate Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who ran against Perry as an independent. "And then we had the [federal] Dubai Ports issue, and this was such a misleading discussion in the public. ... This Dubai company wouldn't own any port; they were just going to run them, and the government would lease it to them. Then Cintra becomes the successful proposer on the corridor and ... it kind of kick-started the 'no foreigners doing business in Texas' discussion."
But David Stall, of the anti-Trans-Texas Corridor group CorridorWatch, has a less benign explanation. Stall says legislators belatedly did their homework on public-private partnerships. "The Legislature did not recognize the shift in transportation policy that they were creating" in 2003, Stall said. "We started to see some handwriting on the wall in 2005, with some moratorium bills that didn't go anywhere. The reason they didn't go anywhere was we were still educating people. I think if legislators were educated in 2003 on what the corridor was, if they had understood it, they would not have voted to authorize its creation."
Looking for Consensus
Enter former Austin mayor and freshman Sen. Kirk Watson. Watson wasn't around in 2003 for the original vote on the corridor and agreements with private companies to build toll roads. But he came to the Lege with voices ringing loudly in his ear -- those of his new constituents. "Part of the reason there is this vitriolic, partisan [no-toll or toll] debate is that we haven't had a thoughtful, systematic, transparent means of analyzing what we want to do," he says. "There are clearly two agreements in this community -- one, we are too badly congested, and two, we want it fixed. When we get to three -- how to do it -- now it's not as unanimous."
Watson is unconvinced that letting a private company pay for, build, and make a profit on a new road is the best way to go. "I was skeptical of these comprehensive development agreements -- how long they were, their noncompete clauses. ... I happen to be a believer that if you're going to privatize, it should be for the stuff the public can't get done. I wasn't convinced -- at beginning or end of session -- that we weren't going to just have privatization on stuff that we couldn't get done in the public sector."
In other words, Watson didn't want profit-minded private companies building roads that could be built by government -- especially if, under noncompete clauses, the state has to pay the companies back for highways that take traffic (and potential income) away from the private toll roads. "I wanted to allow local communities to have more say," Watson explained. "It struck me that one of the things that was missing in the process was we needed more accountability in the system, and that probably meant elected officials having a role." That potentially means fewer deals with private companies and more for state tolling authorities or transportation commissions.
Watson had more than just his own rookie legislative voice to add to the discussion -- in January, he became chairman of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (the group in charge of the region's transportation projects) and vice chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. At his suggestion, CAMPO indefinitely postponed any talk of a second phase of toll roads until it can take more time to sort out how best to finance transportation projects.
But the Legislature's decision to halt most road-building agreements with private companies leaves Central Texas in a bind, as Krusee sees it, when it comes to decongesting traffic. "To my mind, the bad thing about what the Legislature did this session was it took that option away" -- the option to have a private company get started now on building a given road. The Legislature's action doesn't mean that Austin or the surrounding jurisdictions can't build any more toll roads, but it means they can't call on a private company to do so. So as Krusee sees it, we're back at ground zero: Lacking sufficient up-front public funding, the state, via TxDOT, had been looking toward private companies as ideally positioned to help build roads quickly and efficiently, based on the promise of future toll revenue. Now that option is off the table, at least temporarily.
With toll roads built by private companies, says TxDOT's Chase, "You [the state] give up some future revenue to get a project now. You get a guaranteed price on the project, you are guaranteed the project will be returned to you in a certain condition, and the price you pay is you say the company can realize a profit on this over a certain amount of time. Some people had concerns of unlimited company profits without ever reading what the contracts were -- the companies can't raise tolls any time they want. If the profits get to a certain point, it goes back to the region to build more roads."
Often, as was the case with Cintra and the Trans-Texas Corridor, the company pays a large sum -- generally billions of dollars -- to buy the rights to build a road, which could mean the state could get other projects started more quickly using those advance funds.
Even Watson, skeptical as he is that a private company can handle transportation any better than the state, admits that a moratorium on deals with private companies could make it harder to do anything significant about area congestion for the next couple of years. "We're going to need to be honest about limitations of financing tools," he says. "In the state appropriations bill, there was an effective decrease in transportation money, when you consider inflation. There has been more moving of funds from transportation. Many people say they want an increase in gas tax; the House approved a gas tax holiday that would have taken away gas tax money for three months out of the year [that measure died in the Senate]. The money offered to states from federal government is being decreased; we just got notice that federal money rescinded $72 million more. We're going to have to start being honest about the limitations we have on being able to meet the need to fix the problem."
Stranded on the Highway
To that end, Watson has been meeting every two weeks with a CAMPO's Mobility Finance Task Force, which includes elected officials, outside transportation experts, even the executive director of the Community Partnership for the Homeless. Meanwhile, TxDOT has given preliminary approval to a set of toll projects in the Austin area, including some "managed lanes" (for use, say, by carpoolers or during rush hour) as well as the second phase of toll roads Watson doesn't want to talk about for now. TxDOT is also holding a series of public meetings later this year to explain the ramifications of what the Legislature did in suspending many of the proposed deals with private companies.
"We're doing things that no other department of transportation is doing," says Chase. "We're learning it as we go, and we have never ever had to engage the public on this large a scale in our 90-plus years of existence. And in many cases, we underestimated that challenge."
That last sentiment could also apply to those who want to do something about Austin's traffic congestion. If the Lege managed to placate the anti-toll crowd, at least for the time being, it didn't do much to make it any easier to travel on Central Texas highways, nor to address long-term projections that show regional traffic only getting worse. More broadly, the moratorium doesn't begin to address larger questions raised by traditional highway approaches to transportation: land use, mass transit options, pollution and global warming issues, or even integrated urban planning that might make transportation issues less intractable and expensive.
Those are the kind of issues that Sally Campbell hoped the Legislature would consider. Campbell is the executive director of Envision Central Texas, a 6-year-old nonprofit coalition aimed at addressing regional growth. Campbell wanted to hear more discussion and action on giving counties more control over land uses around future highways and relocating Union Pacific away from rail lines that commuters could use. "When we truly want to see this multimodal transportation system develop, the next step is to look at the transit options. And right now, we're trying to figure out what will work and what's the logical system. If you can think about commuter rail from San Antonio to Georgetown by relocating Union Pacific, that makes a whole other mode within the realm of possibility."
But rail relocation, and most other proposals for broadening the state's transportation options, remained stuck at the station during the 80th Legislature. What most legislators wanted to discuss was how to pay for new roads and where to put them. Whether Krusee's interest in more privatization or Watson's desire for greater accountability in transportation policy ultimately win the day in the current discussions, it could be two years -- or more -- before getting around seems much easier, even though commuter rail could start running through the region by the end of 2008.
That will be just in time for the 81st Legislature -- and a whole new set of political detours during the next round of transportation debates.
Read more
It was Dec. 16, 2004, and Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Round Rock, was sitting pretty. He was virtually a guest of honor at a meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission, across the street from his Capitol office. A little more than a year before, as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, Krusee had successfully carried the behemoth House Bill 3588. Among its many and complex provisions, the bill helped smooth the way for Gov. Rick Perry to get the Texas Transportation Commission to approve early plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor. Stretching from Mexico to Oklahoma, the corridor would be a mammoth transportation project running parallel to I-35. As conceived, it would include free and tolled highway lanes, as well as rail and utility lines, and would be built and maintained by the privately held Spanish company Cintra (an international operator of toll roads and car parks) and the San Antonio-based Zachry Construction Corp.
At the Texas Transportation Commission meeting, attended by the governor himself, Krusee didn't say much. Actions spoke louder than words -- and on this day, the commission was acting on a project he had fought long and hard to convince legislators to support. By way of acknowledgment, commission Chairman Ric Williamson duly praised Krusee for his work at the Capitol. Krusee had a flight to catch, but first he took the floor for a brief stroll down memory lane.
"I started thinking about the first time that I met Ric Williamson," Krusee recalled, according to a meeting transcript. It was 1992, and Krusee had just been elected to the House; then-Rep. Williamson invited the 32-year-old Krusee to his apartment. "So I went over there, and Ric had one of his good friends over there, and that was the night I met Rick Perry, who was the ag commissioner, and we talked long into the night about accomplishing great things for Texas, about how to be a great leader for Texas. And we weren't thinking about how to be on Texas Monthly's 10 best [list] -- but you know, Ric, I think we were talking about days like this.
"And you know, governor," Krusee continued, "A little over two years ago when you made that presentation [about the Trans-Texas Corridor] in the auditorium at the Capitol, and I was in the audience, and like everybody else out there, I didn't really fully grasp what the hell you were talking about." The audience laughed.
"You do now, don't you?" asked Perry.
"I do now," Krusee replied. "And I want to congratulate you on your vision and your leadership, and the commission and your staff on your hard work, because you have made this, I think sincerely, the most historic day in transportation, not just for Texas, but for the United States since Eisenhower." With that, Krusee left the meeting.
Flash forward nearly 21/2 years -- to May 2, 2007. Chairman Krusee stood on the House floor, without a single transportation ally. Every House member present, except Krusee alone, voted in favor of HB 1892, which included a two-year moratorium on many of the public-private partnerships such as the one the Texas Department of Transportation had developed with Cintra-Zachry to build the Trans-Texas Corridor. "Who knew that trying to reduce congestion could be such a lonely fight?" wondered Coby Chase, who monitors the Legislature for TxDOT.
Perry eventually vetoed HB 1892, but a nearly identical Senate substitute, Senate Bill 792, later handily passed both the House and Senate, and Perry signed it into law. The massive bill forbids TxDOT from negotiating a tolling agreement with a private company until Sept. 1, 2009, exempting some projects already under way. Even among those exempted projects, some got swept up in the post-session, anti-privatization maelstrom. For instance, at its June meeting, the Texas Transportation Commission awarded a contract for the State Highway 121 project (in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex) to the North Texas Tollway Authority -- after initially awarding the contract to Cintra.
SB 792 also states that if a company paid TxDOT money up front for the rights to build a toll road in a particular region, TxDOT must use that money on other projects in that region. It requires TxDOT to give local tolling agencies preferential treatment over private companies by giving them free right-of-way and the right of first refusal on building toll roads. In essence, the Legislature left private companies interested in transportation on the bench for the next two years.
Politics or Policy?
So what happened? How could Rep. Krusee, four years earlier, convince all but three members of the House to approve legislation that enabled private companies to build highways, only to find that entire concept rejected out of hand this year? Not surprisingly, it depends on whom you ask.
"What happened was," Krusee said after the session, "TxDOT was going not just against the traditional rural opposition to road building but against Dallas and Houston in a turf battle over who would build the roads." In Dallas, Houston, Austin, and elsewhere, public toll-road authorities were getting outgunned by private companies like Cintra, and they weren't happy, Krusee says, so they asked their legislators to give tolling authorities right of first refusal. Krusee didn't take it personally that he seemed to be the only member of the House who wanted private companies to continue building roads. "I think it was a political vote," he said. "Members thought it was necessary to vote that way to get votes back home; they felt like they'd be criticized for voting against it."
Chase agrees with Krusee and points to the larger political context. "During this last election cycle, we had a candidate for governor; she liked to campaign against foreigners and against toll roads," Chase explained, in reference to gubernatorial candidate Carole Keeton Strayhorn, who ran against Perry as an independent. "And then we had the [federal] Dubai Ports issue, and this was such a misleading discussion in the public. ... This Dubai company wouldn't own any port; they were just going to run them, and the government would lease it to them. Then Cintra becomes the successful proposer on the corridor and ... it kind of kick-started the 'no foreigners doing business in Texas' discussion."
But David Stall, of the anti-Trans-Texas Corridor group CorridorWatch, has a less benign explanation. Stall says legislators belatedly did their homework on public-private partnerships. "The Legislature did not recognize the shift in transportation policy that they were creating" in 2003, Stall said. "We started to see some handwriting on the wall in 2005, with some moratorium bills that didn't go anywhere. The reason they didn't go anywhere was we were still educating people. I think if legislators were educated in 2003 on what the corridor was, if they had understood it, they would not have voted to authorize its creation."
Looking for Consensus
Enter former Austin mayor and freshman Sen. Kirk Watson. Watson wasn't around in 2003 for the original vote on the corridor and agreements with private companies to build toll roads. But he came to the Lege with voices ringing loudly in his ear -- those of his new constituents. "Part of the reason there is this vitriolic, partisan [no-toll or toll] debate is that we haven't had a thoughtful, systematic, transparent means of analyzing what we want to do," he says. "There are clearly two agreements in this community -- one, we are too badly congested, and two, we want it fixed. When we get to three -- how to do it -- now it's not as unanimous."
Watson is unconvinced that letting a private company pay for, build, and make a profit on a new road is the best way to go. "I was skeptical of these comprehensive development agreements -- how long they were, their noncompete clauses. ... I happen to be a believer that if you're going to privatize, it should be for the stuff the public can't get done. I wasn't convinced -- at beginning or end of session -- that we weren't going to just have privatization on stuff that we couldn't get done in the public sector."
In other words, Watson didn't want profit-minded private companies building roads that could be built by government -- especially if, under noncompete clauses, the state has to pay the companies back for highways that take traffic (and potential income) away from the private toll roads. "I wanted to allow local communities to have more say," Watson explained. "It struck me that one of the things that was missing in the process was we needed more accountability in the system, and that probably meant elected officials having a role." That potentially means fewer deals with private companies and more for state tolling authorities or transportation commissions.
Watson had more than just his own rookie legislative voice to add to the discussion -- in January, he became chairman of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (the group in charge of the region's transportation projects) and vice chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee. At his suggestion, CAMPO indefinitely postponed any talk of a second phase of toll roads until it can take more time to sort out how best to finance transportation projects.
But the Legislature's decision to halt most road-building agreements with private companies leaves Central Texas in a bind, as Krusee sees it, when it comes to decongesting traffic. "To my mind, the bad thing about what the Legislature did this session was it took that option away" -- the option to have a private company get started now on building a given road. The Legislature's action doesn't mean that Austin or the surrounding jurisdictions can't build any more toll roads, but it means they can't call on a private company to do so. So as Krusee sees it, we're back at ground zero: Lacking sufficient up-front public funding, the state, via TxDOT, had been looking toward private companies as ideally positioned to help build roads quickly and efficiently, based on the promise of future toll revenue. Now that option is off the table, at least temporarily.
With toll roads built by private companies, says TxDOT's Chase, "You [the state] give up some future revenue to get a project now. You get a guaranteed price on the project, you are guaranteed the project will be returned to you in a certain condition, and the price you pay is you say the company can realize a profit on this over a certain amount of time. Some people had concerns of unlimited company profits without ever reading what the contracts were -- the companies can't raise tolls any time they want. If the profits get to a certain point, it goes back to the region to build more roads."
Often, as was the case with Cintra and the Trans-Texas Corridor, the company pays a large sum -- generally billions of dollars -- to buy the rights to build a road, which could mean the state could get other projects started more quickly using those advance funds.
Even Watson, skeptical as he is that a private company can handle transportation any better than the state, admits that a moratorium on deals with private companies could make it harder to do anything significant about area congestion for the next couple of years. "We're going to need to be honest about limitations of financing tools," he says. "In the state appropriations bill, there was an effective decrease in transportation money, when you consider inflation. There has been more moving of funds from transportation. Many people say they want an increase in gas tax; the House approved a gas tax holiday that would have taken away gas tax money for three months out of the year [that measure died in the Senate]. The money offered to states from federal government is being decreased; we just got notice that federal money rescinded $72 million more. We're going to have to start being honest about the limitations we have on being able to meet the need to fix the problem."
Stranded on the Highway
To that end, Watson has been meeting every two weeks with a CAMPO's Mobility Finance Task Force, which includes elected officials, outside transportation experts, even the executive director of the Community Partnership for the Homeless. Meanwhile, TxDOT has given preliminary approval to a set of toll projects in the Austin area, including some "managed lanes" (for use, say, by carpoolers or during rush hour) as well as the second phase of toll roads Watson doesn't want to talk about for now. TxDOT is also holding a series of public meetings later this year to explain the ramifications of what the Legislature did in suspending many of the proposed deals with private companies.
"We're doing things that no other department of transportation is doing," says Chase. "We're learning it as we go, and we have never ever had to engage the public on this large a scale in our 90-plus years of existence. And in many cases, we underestimated that challenge."
That last sentiment could also apply to those who want to do something about Austin's traffic congestion. If the Lege managed to placate the anti-toll crowd, at least for the time being, it didn't do much to make it any easier to travel on Central Texas highways, nor to address long-term projections that show regional traffic only getting worse. More broadly, the moratorium doesn't begin to address larger questions raised by traditional highway approaches to transportation: land use, mass transit options, pollution and global warming issues, or even integrated urban planning that might make transportation issues less intractable and expensive.
Those are the kind of issues that Sally Campbell hoped the Legislature would consider. Campbell is the executive director of Envision Central Texas, a 6-year-old nonprofit coalition aimed at addressing regional growth. Campbell wanted to hear more discussion and action on giving counties more control over land uses around future highways and relocating Union Pacific away from rail lines that commuters could use. "When we truly want to see this multimodal transportation system develop, the next step is to look at the transit options. And right now, we're trying to figure out what will work and what's the logical system. If you can think about commuter rail from San Antonio to Georgetown by relocating Union Pacific, that makes a whole other mode within the realm of possibility."
But rail relocation, and most other proposals for broadening the state's transportation options, remained stuck at the station during the 80th Legislature. What most legislators wanted to discuss was how to pay for new roads and where to put them. Whether Krusee's interest in more privatization or Watson's desire for greater accountability in transportation policy ultimately win the day in the current discussions, it could be two years -- or more -- before getting around seems much easier, even though commuter rail could start running through the region by the end of 2008.
That will be just in time for the 81st Legislature -- and a whole new set of political detours during the next round of transportation debates.
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