Showing posts with label gas tax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gas tax. Show all posts
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Study to kick-start highway bill lobbying
By Jim Snyder - The Hill - January 15, 2008
Business groups are looking at Tuesday’s release of a transportation study as a start-your-engines moment to what is likely to be one of the most aggressively lobbied highway bills in recent memory.
A panel of public and private officials who reviewed the country’s transportation needs for the past two years wrote the long-awaited report. Congress formed the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission in the last highway bill.
The report will examine all four components of the transportation infrastructure system: freight rail lines, highways and bridges, ports, and mass transit systems.
The current highway bill lasts until 2009, but lobbyists anticipate the debate over surface transportation will begin this year given the rising importance of transportation bottlenecks on operating costs. An anticipated $4 billion shortfall in transportation accounts in 2008 is also likely to drive the transportation debate on Capitol Hill.
One key element of the debate is whether the gas tax should be significantly increased to help pay for new spending.
Under the plan endorsed by a majority of panel members, the federal share of transportation spending would increase from 37 percent to 40 percent, according to one lobbyist.
There is a broad coalition of forces arrayed in support of tax increases, but increasing the gas tax is likely to remain politically difficult.
“A special commission came up with an old, cold, bad idea,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. “This is a disappointment and probably even a big waste of tax dollars,” Grassley said in a statement anticipating the panel’s report.
Transportation lobbyists said the committee itself was split on the need to raise taxes. The Bush administration opposes a tax hike, and current Transportation Secretary Mary Peters reportedly is one of the panel members to have argued against raising taxes as a way to spend more on infrastructure.
However, groups like NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally allergic to tax hikes, in this case have joined contractors, civil engineers and others in support of higher user fees.
“This is a priority for [our members] as the costs for logistics are increasing much faster than they have before,” Palmieri said.
The issue of infrastructure spending “has never been more important to them. It is very high on the agenda,” he said.
He noted one estimate that congestion adds $8 billion a year in prices for consumer goods.
Kavinoky, who is also the executive director of Americans for Transportation Mobility, one of several infrastructure coalitions formed in anticipation of the next highway bill debate, defended the tax.
Even though the bulk of the new money would come from an increased gas tax, long the mainstay in transportation funding, business lobbyists also anticipate the report will recommend the sort of paradigm shift they were looking for.
One lobbyist, for example, expected the report to call for the creation of a permanent commission that would develop a transportation bill through a process that mirrors the Base Closure and Realignment Commission method Congress adopted to handle the politically sensitive work of closing military bases.
Under that scenario, Congress would approve or reject the commission’s transportation report. But lawmakers would not be able to amend the legislation.
The report is also expected to advocate for a performance-based matrix that would tie funding to improvements in safety, congestion and maintenance efforts.
“That is the equivalent of a massive earthquake in transportation policy,” Kavinoky said.
Kavinoky said federal dollars are distributed by program with little regard to how the money will improve performance.
A variety of other funding mechanisms are expected to be proposed by panel members to improve system performance.
Those are likely to include public-private partnerships for toll roads that are controversial in some quarters, and a transit tax to support expansion of public transportation programs.
Read more in THE HILL
Business groups are looking at Tuesday’s release of a transportation study as a start-your-engines moment to what is likely to be one of the most aggressively lobbied highway bills in recent memory.
A panel of public and private officials who reviewed the country’s transportation needs for the past two years wrote the long-awaited report. Congress formed the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission in the last highway bill.
“Every stakeholder in the transportation industry … has been waiting for this report to come out,” said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“Nothing like this has been done before,” said Rosario Palmieri, vice president for infrastructure policy at the National Association of Manufacturers.
The report will examine all four components of the transportation infrastructure system: freight rail lines, highways and bridges, ports, and mass transit systems.
The current highway bill lasts until 2009, but lobbyists anticipate the debate over surface transportation will begin this year given the rising importance of transportation bottlenecks on operating costs. An anticipated $4 billion shortfall in transportation accounts in 2008 is also likely to drive the transportation debate on Capitol Hill.
One key element of the debate is whether the gas tax should be significantly increased to help pay for new spending.
Under the plan endorsed by a majority of panel members, the federal share of transportation spending would increase from 37 percent to 40 percent, according to one lobbyist.
There is a broad coalition of forces arrayed in support of tax increases, but increasing the gas tax is likely to remain politically difficult.
“A special commission came up with an old, cold, bad idea,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. “This is a disappointment and probably even a big waste of tax dollars,” Grassley said in a statement anticipating the panel’s report.
Transportation lobbyists said the committee itself was split on the need to raise taxes. The Bush administration opposes a tax hike, and current Transportation Secretary Mary Peters reportedly is one of the panel members to have argued against raising taxes as a way to spend more on infrastructure.
However, groups like NAM and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, normally allergic to tax hikes, in this case have joined contractors, civil engineers and others in support of higher user fees.
“This is a priority for [our members] as the costs for logistics are increasing much faster than they have before,” Palmieri said.
The issue of infrastructure spending “has never been more important to them. It is very high on the agenda,” he said.
He noted one estimate that congestion adds $8 billion a year in prices for consumer goods.
Kavinoky, who is also the executive director of Americans for Transportation Mobility, one of several infrastructure coalitions formed in anticipation of the next highway bill debate, defended the tax.
“Right now, a user fee is the simplest and most straight-forward way to collect revenues,” she said.
Even though the bulk of the new money would come from an increased gas tax, long the mainstay in transportation funding, business lobbyists also anticipate the report will recommend the sort of paradigm shift they were looking for.
One lobbyist, for example, expected the report to call for the creation of a permanent commission that would develop a transportation bill through a process that mirrors the Base Closure and Realignment Commission method Congress adopted to handle the politically sensitive work of closing military bases.
Under that scenario, Congress would approve or reject the commission’s transportation report. But lawmakers would not be able to amend the legislation.
The report is also expected to advocate for a performance-based matrix that would tie funding to improvements in safety, congestion and maintenance efforts.
“That is the equivalent of a massive earthquake in transportation policy,” Kavinoky said.
Kavinoky said federal dollars are distributed by program with little regard to how the money will improve performance.
A variety of other funding mechanisms are expected to be proposed by panel members to improve system performance.
Those are likely to include public-private partnerships for toll roads that are controversial in some quarters, and a transit tax to support expansion of public transportation programs.
Read more in THE HILL
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Accountability 101 - Who's to Blame?
In the wake of the I-35W bridge collapse, it's time to take a hard look at the politicians and policies that may have contributed to the disaster
BY G.R. ANDERSON JR. AND PAUL DEMKO - Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages - August 15, 2007
Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's junior U.S. Senator, may have said it best: "A bridge in America just shouldn't fall down."
But shortly after 6 p.m. on August 1, one of them did. Anyone who reached the Mississippi river before Minneapolis police could cordon off a wide perimeter around the fallen I-35W bridge got a startling view of the disaster: smoke, sirens, choppers, cracked concrete, crushed cars, and the walking (and swimming) wounded.
During the frantic recovery efforts, politicians called a moratorium on finger-pointing. In a press conference 90 minutes after the collapse, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty pledged cooperation, despite their diametrically opposed politics.
It didn't last long. On August 2nd, Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar, a Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, assailed President George W. Bush from the House floor. In October 2003, Bush made a counter-offer on a transportation bill that left the budget for surface and bridge repair "still $90 billion below where his own Department of Transportation said it needed to be," Oberstar said. "This administration failed to support a robust investment in surface transportation and the funding to accompany it."
The Bush administration, for its part, immediately placed the blame squarely on Minnesota's state government. According to the Associated Press, "Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said that while the inspection did not indicate the bridge was at risk of failing, 'if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions.'"
The truth is there's plenty of blame to go around. The investigators and engineers at the National Transportation Safety Board expect to spend roughly 18 months conducting a thorough investigation into exactly what went wrong. But it's not too early to ask about the decisions and policies that may have contributed to this disaster. After all, there are 1,097 bridges in Minnesota deemed "structurally deficient."
Says one longtime Republican state transportation lobbyist: "To cut to the heart of it: Who's culpable?"
GOVERNOR
Governor Tim Pawlenty addresses the media horde the day after the bridge collapseIn 1999, as state House majority leader, Pawlenty said that he would not support a gas tax increase for freeway lane expansion. In 2001, Pawlenty called the metro's roads a "vehicular prison system." But in both cases, Pawlenty unveiled complicated plans to pour money into the state's road system that, in many regards, didn't come to fruition.
Then Pawlenty emerged as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2002. His opponent for the party's nod, Brian Sullivan, outflanked Pawlenty to the right by outspokenly opposing a gas tax increase. Pawlenty followed suit, signing a no-new-taxes pledge with the Taxpayers League, handcuffing his options before he was even elected.
Pawlenty made good on his promise. In 2005 and 2007 the governor gleefully vetoed a gas tax increase, even as Republicans like Ron Erhardt, who was among the sponsors of the measure both times, tried to get Pawlenty to see the necessity of it. "We were quite happy in 2007 because we got a bipartisan plan passed," Erhardt says. "The leadership in this party has dropped the ball on funding transportation issues, just because somebody, a big somebody, signed a no-new-taxes pledge."
A gas tax increase that went to a dedicated fund for transportation could have taken the metro's roadways and transit system out of the 1970s, and into the future. More importantly, the federal government requires that states match funding up to 20 percent to receive money earmarked for transportation infrastructure. "Go ask MnDOT how much money is sitting in Washington for us, that we left on the table because we don't have a gas tax," says a transportation lobbyist.
Mitigating factor: As much as any one person can shoulder the blame, Pawlenty looks culpable. The collapse happened on his watch, after all, and his lieutenant governor, whom he also appointed to be transportation commissioner, was supposed to know about MnDOT's alarming reports. But to his credit, Pawlenty has finally done an about face on the gas tax.
TRANSPORTATION COMMISSIONER
Carol Molnau
Molnau doesn't have the kind of technical background you'd expect from the person responsible for building and maintaining the state's transportation infrastructure. Raised on a farm in Lafayette, Molnau has demonstrated her rural bona fides by milking cows, and once famously beat former Governor Jesse Ventura in a keg-throwing contest.
But after Pawlenty tapped her to be his running mate, and the two breezed into office in 2002, she soon found herself taking on a second job as transportation commissioner. Although it may have seemed an odd fit, the appointment posed two advantages for Pawlenty: It allowed him to cut the $108,000 salary typically paid to someone in that position, and put an anti-tax ally in charge of an agency with an annual budget of $2 billion.
Upon taking over the two roles, Molnau vowed that she would bring "reform and accountability" to MnDOT. It's been all downhill since then. She sparred with the governor over the North Star commuter line, and due to a controversy over bids, delayed the much-needed overhaul of the Crosstown and I-35W Commons south of Minneapolis. Molnau has toed the line against an increase in a gas tax, and spoken out against funding for mass transit, emphasizing politics over policy. As a result, she has overseen the steady decline—by fiscal neglect—of the state's road and bridge infrastructure.
Mitigating factors: Molnau was in China when the bridge collapsed, which is somewhat symbolic of her tenure as transportation commissioner. But it's not her fault she was appointed to a job she wasn't qualified to do. After all, as Molnau told the Star Tribune, "Do I look at the bridge inspection reports? No ... I really believe we have professionals trained to do that."
MnDOT
Less than 24 hours after the bridge collapsed, Dan Dorgan, MnDOT's top bridge engineer, gamely faced a throng of TV cameras and microphones. Sweating profusely, Dorgan looked like a man undergoing an exceptionally painful colonoscopy. Here was a geek used to spending intimate time with bridge blueprints and inspection reports being forced to answer the question on everyone's mind: How could this happen?
Dorgan walked the press through the basics of bridge inspection, detailing the history of the I-35W bridge and defining the suddenly trenchant term "structurally deficient." But when asked if he was convinced that MnDOT had done everything it could to insure that the bridge was structurally sound, Dorgan provided his most revealing answer: "In light of what happened, I would say we thought we had done all we could. Obviously something went terribly wrong."
MnDOT's dysfunction has been well documented. In 2003, the Star Tribune ran a series of stories detailing myriad problems within the agency, from shoddy contracting to profligate spending to low-balling property owners when purchasing land for highways. To cite just one example of misplaced priorities, in 2002 MnDOT paid $10,750 to a conference speaker to detail "The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Harley Davidson."
MnDOT knew there was a problem with the bridge and was in a position to do something about it. In 2006, URS Corporation, one of the largest engineering firms worldwide, released an in-depth study of the I-35W bridge and offered three possible courses of corrective action to ensure the structure's safety. MnDOT, despite heated internal debate, chose the cheapest option: continued inspections.
This decision was made despite numerous obstacles that made meticulous visual examinations of the bridge nearly impossible. In fact, the URS report pointed out that access to some of the most vulnerable portions of the bridge was "very limited." Inspectors struggled with piles of pigeon shit, bats, spider webs, poor lighting, and angry motorists, who occasionally expressed their frustration at lane closures by hurling debris at MnDOT workers.
In sum, MnDOT has all the hallmarks of a paranoid bureaucracy more concerned with safe-guarding its turf and reputation than actually building and maintaining the state's transportation infrastructure. Considering this dysfunctional state of affairs and the chronic under-funding of the department, it's a wonder that more bridges haven't crumbled.
Mitigating factors: MnDOT has no power over budgeting. The agency must make do with the insufficient financial resources allocated by the legislature and the governor. "The professional staff over there assembles the best research that they can," says Rick Krueger, executive director of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, a coalition of businesses, labor, and local governments that advocates for better roadways. "There's been a glaring lack of funding in transportation investment that needs to be addressed."
The Taxpayers League
Locally, the Taxpayers League led the way for a new era of small-government starve-the-beasters, and no one banged the drum more loudly than its then-president, David Strom. As the 2002 election returns came in and it became clear that Republicans would win big, Strom was not shy in proclaiming victory. "One word: mandate," he told the Star Tribune.
Strom and the league had reason to crow: They helped elect a slew of their candidates, most of them signing a no-new-taxes pledge. Among them was gubernatorial candidate Tim Pawlenty.
In deference to his benefactors, Pawlenty led an unprecedented era of slash-and-burn politics, most of his policies heartily endorsed by Strom. In 2004, for instance, a Metro Transit bus strike instigated by Pawlenty was cheered by Strom and other anti-transit blowhards on the sidelines. And every time Pawlenty vetoed an increase in the gas tax, it wasn't hard to see the governor's pen was being directed by the Taxpayers League.
When word got around last week that Pawlenty was finally considering a gas tax hike in the face of the catastrophe, Strom, who is no longer the president of the league, piped up that Pawlenty had "panicked." But perhaps it's Strom and his ilk who are panicked, after realizing that their brand of bull-headed ideology hamstrings government to the point where it can't perform its most basic function: Protecting the citizenry.
Mitigating factor: Strom has moved on from his post as the head of the Taxpayers League, clearing the way for former State Rep. Phil Krinkie, whose hard-line stance on taxes has earned him the nickname Dr. "No."
STATE HOUSE MINORITY LEADER
Marty Seifert
The House minority leader has been Pawlenty's staunchest deputy in fighting DFL efforts to increase the gas tax in recent years, despite glaring holes in the state's transportation budget. It's now projected that over the next six years there will be an annual funding shortfall of $2.4 billion for transportation projects. Over the next two decades, the funding gap is expected to reach more than $30 billion
Last legislative session, Democrats attempted to staunch the ballooning deficit. The legislature approved a measure that would eventually raise the gas tax by 7.5 cents, which would have been the first gas tax hike since 1988.
But Seifert sneered at even this modest transporation fee. "Joe Sixpack back home does not need more tax increases," he said in March. "This is a morbidly obese tax increase."
Even with Seifert pooh-poohing it, the measure initially cleared the House and Senate with 11 Republican legislators joining their DFL colleagues in voting for it. But the margin in the House was just one vote over the two-thirds threshold needed to override a veto.
After Pawlenty spiked the bill, Seifert led an intense lobbying campaign to convince Republicans not to contradict the Governor. Those who had voted in favor were inundated with phone calls and emails. Eventually four Republicans (Jim Abeler, Bud Heidgerken, Dean Urdahl and Kathy Tingelstad) flipped their votes. The veto held.
"It was a loyalty to the Governor kind of thing," says Rep. Frank Hornstein (DFL-St. Paul), who sits on the transportation finance committee. "This was a huge issue for Marty Seifert."
Following the bridge collapse, Seifert has continued to insist that a gas tax increase is unnecessary.
Mitigating factor: Seifert was merely carrying water for the Governor. His spirited defense was at some level standard partisan politics.
The Bridge Builders
Kurt Fhurman, the inspector responsible for signing off on the I-35W bridge every year since 1994, thinks he knows who is responsible for the collapse.
"Go after the designer," Fhurman angrily told the New York Daily News several days after the collapse. "Go ask him why he did what he did."
The bridge was designed in 1961 by Sverdrup & Parcel, a prominent firm that also designed Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the Superdome in New Orleans, and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The bridge was built between 1964 and 1967 by Industrial Construction Company and Hurcon Inc. Both businesses are now defunct.
Even though it's early in the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board is already raising questions about the bridge's design. One issue of concern: the bridge didn't have any piers built into the riverbed. It also lacked what are commonly referred to as "engineering redundancies"—back-up support built into the system to minimize damage if one part fails.
Last week, the NTSB and Federal Highway Authority focused on so-called gusset plates, steel sheets that connected the bridge's girders together. The inspectors said the plates may have been a design flaw.
Mitigating factor: To be fair, the bridge was built in a dark period of American construction. In the 1960s and early 1970s, builders and policy officials believed engineering had evolved to the point where bridges could be built on the cheap—a notion that disappeared just a few years after the I-35W bridge opened.
Progressive Contractors, Inc.
At the time of the bridge collapse, 18 employees from Progressive Contractors were in the midst of completing $2.4 million in repairs. The St. Michael-based construction company, founded in 1971, had been working on the bridge since early June. For two months, workers drilled into the surface with jackhammers, cut away pavement with saws, and poured concrete.
But what raised eyebrows about the work was the sheer volume of equipment and construction materials deployed on the bridge at the time of collapse. Federal authorities estimate that the bridge was supporting 100 tons of gravel, at least two semitrailers, and an unknown quantity of concrete, which weighs close to 100 pounds per cubic foot. Neither Progressive Contractors nor MnDOT conducted a study to scrutinize how the construction work might impact the bridge's safety.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters highlighted this potential factor in a statement released last week. "Given the questions being raised by the NTSB, it is vital that states remain mindful of the extra weight construction projects place on bridges," she said.
Progressive Contractors, which specializes in bridge and highway construction, maintains that it's not unusual to have that much equipment onsite. "Their people are just as baffled as everyone," says David Lillehaug, the attorney representing the company. "We're just scratching our heads with this."
Progressive Contractors also disputes reports that the bridge had been swaying prior to the collapse. "We have now met with every single worker who was on the bridge when it collapsed. None of them observed or reported any unusual swaying," said Tom Sloan, vice president of the company's bridge division, in a statement released last week.
But Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a University of California, Berkeley professor who is a bridge expert, says that construction activities may have been one factor in creating a "perfect storm" that led to the failure of the structure. "The last straw may be the construction," he says.
Mitigating factor: MnDOT's chief bridge engineer, Dan Dorgan, has said the I-35W bridge was built to meet military specifications, meaning that it should have been able to withstand bumper-to-bumper traffic of flatbeds carrying M1 Abrams tanks, which would be significantly heavier than the construction equipment and materials on the bridge at the time of the collapse.
The Previous Administrations
Remember the famous "Jesse Checks" that Governor Ventura put in everyone's mailbox? Those were heady times from 1999 to 2001, when the state was running a surplus and Governor Turnbuckle gave Minnesotans a rebate on sales tax collection. Everyone cheered because Jesse got us our money back.
Turns out popular policy isn't always good policy. Aside from looking wasteful when the state budget bottomed out in 2002, those funds could have gone to a roadway system that everyone knew was badly in need of an overhaul. In 2000, the rebate took some $200 million away from transportation needs. More saliently, Ventura also urged lawmakers to cut license tab registration fees that year, a move that depleted the highway trust fund by some $170 million annually.
Ventura wasn't the only governor who was shortsighted with transportation funding. For years, Arne Carlson said he was against an increase in the gas tax, and though the state Senate passed one in 1997, the measure didn't pass the House because Carlson wouldn't support it. For most of his tenure, Carlson was more interested in using tollbooths as a revenue source, but the idea never took off.
In short, both governors ignored the fact that our roadways were deteriorating.
Mitigating factors: The gas tax, which was last increased in 1988 from 17 to 20 cents a gallon, has long been unpopular with Minnesotans. The state was running budget surpluses during most of Ventura and Carlson's tenures in office, and raising taxes didn't seem necessary.
The Bureaucracy
Aside from a lack of money to get matching funds for federal projects, the many steps required for reviewing and planning Minnesota's roadways and interstates is hopelessly tangled up in red tape.
For example, federal law requires that a regional planning agency oversee transportation dollars sent to the state. For the seven-county Twin Cities area, that agency is the Metropolitan Council. The council takes its cue from the Transportation Advisory Board, which was created by the state legislature in 1974. The board is responsible for reviewing MnDOT plans and reports, and issuing recommendations to the Met Council, which accepts or rejects the board's recommendation as a whole. Then the council takes its case to the legislature and the governor's office, which decide which projects need to be funded.
The biggest problem with the system, of course, is that urgent projects get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, and pet projects jump to the head of the line—especially new construction rather than repair, because, politically speaking, such ventures are far sexier to lawmakers and constituents alike. In other words, the system is not only arcane, but also highly susceptible to politicization.
Mitigating factors: In recent years, the Met Council has had its work cut out for it, with folks like Pawlenty, Strom, and a host of other local neo-con think-tankers being openly hostile to the regional planning agency. Even if the Met Council and MnDOT had been working in perfect concert and sounding the bells for the right projects at the right time, it's likely their pleas would have fallen on deaf ears.
The Federal Government
Blaming the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota on the war in Iraq might seem like a parody of knee-jerk liberalism, but that doesn't mean there isn't some truth in it.
Of course, inadequate federal funding of transportation infrastructure is a phenomenon that precedes the present administration. Former DFL Sen. Dave Durenberger recalls the same frustration two decades earlier during the Reagan years. "I was trying to get colleagues and the president to see that our federal highway system was deteriorating at an alarming rate, but no one wanted to hear it," he says.
Even so, it's impossible not to think longingly of the $450 billion-plus we've squandered in Iraq. Terrorists might not have blown up the I-35W bridge, but they certainly distracted us from the pressing problems at home.
Mitigating factor: Donald Rumsfeld isn't transportation secretary.
Shiny New Toys
Politicians like to build things. They like ribbon cuttings and newspaper photos and structures bearing their own illustrious names. Proof of this phenomenon? The Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing.
Closer to home, the same phenomenon partly explains why the legislature can find half a billion dollars to spend on the Hiawatha light rail line, but can't scrape up sufficient resources to maintain roads and bridges. Or to cite a more egregious example, it's why, when all is said and done, we will likely have spent somewhere in the area of $2 billion dollars on sports stadiums. Nobody gets a PR boost when MnDOT allocates additional funds to reinforce gusset plates.
"Bridges actually are in better shape than a lot of other parts of our infrastructure," says Kent Harries, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's going to get worse, and it's going to get exponentially worse."
Mitigating factor: The argument pitting highways against public transit is wrongheaded. The truth is that substantial investment will have to be made in both to keep up with the state's transportation needs.
It's amazing how a tangle of steel and concrete and bodies in the Mississippi River can concentrate minds and galvanize action.
It wasn't 72 hours after the bridge collapsed that Governor Pawlenty was conceding the need to increase the gas tax. Congress signed off on a $250 million emergency appropriations bill before the week was over. By the end of last week, plans to build a new bridge were on the fast track. The goal is to have it finished by the end of 2008.
The investigation into what went wrong and how to prevent such tragedies in the future is a murkier business. The NTSB immediately had investigators on the ground poking through the wreckage. Eventually, the bridge will be reconstructed, piece by piece, much like a crashed airplane, in an effort to discover which part failed first.
But whatever combination of factors are ultimately deemed to have resulted in the dramatic collapse of the bridge, it may turn out that the biggest problem had nothing to do with concrete or steel but rather something much more human: a failure of planning and public policy.
Read more & see photos
BY G.R. ANDERSON JR. AND PAUL DEMKO - Minneapolis/St. Paul City Pages - August 15, 2007
Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota's junior U.S. Senator, may have said it best: "A bridge in America just shouldn't fall down."
But shortly after 6 p.m. on August 1, one of them did. Anyone who reached the Mississippi river before Minneapolis police could cordon off a wide perimeter around the fallen I-35W bridge got a startling view of the disaster: smoke, sirens, choppers, cracked concrete, crushed cars, and the walking (and swimming) wounded.
During the frantic recovery efforts, politicians called a moratorium on finger-pointing. In a press conference 90 minutes after the collapse, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty pledged cooperation, despite their diametrically opposed politics.
It didn't last long. On August 2nd, Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar, a Democrat who chairs the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, assailed President George W. Bush from the House floor. In October 2003, Bush made a counter-offer on a transportation bill that left the budget for surface and bridge repair "still $90 billion below where his own Department of Transportation said it needed to be," Oberstar said. "This administration failed to support a robust investment in surface transportation and the funding to accompany it."
The Bush administration, for its part, immediately placed the blame squarely on Minnesota's state government. According to the Associated Press, "Bush's spokesman, Tony Snow, said that while the inspection did not indicate the bridge was at risk of failing, 'if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions.'"
The truth is there's plenty of blame to go around. The investigators and engineers at the National Transportation Safety Board expect to spend roughly 18 months conducting a thorough investigation into exactly what went wrong. But it's not too early to ask about the decisions and policies that may have contributed to this disaster. After all, there are 1,097 bridges in Minnesota deemed "structurally deficient."
Says one longtime Republican state transportation lobbyist: "To cut to the heart of it: Who's culpable?"
GOVERNOR
Governor Tim Pawlenty addresses the media horde the day after the bridge collapseIn 1999, as state House majority leader, Pawlenty said that he would not support a gas tax increase for freeway lane expansion. In 2001, Pawlenty called the metro's roads a "vehicular prison system." But in both cases, Pawlenty unveiled complicated plans to pour money into the state's road system that, in many regards, didn't come to fruition.
Then Pawlenty emerged as a Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2002. His opponent for the party's nod, Brian Sullivan, outflanked Pawlenty to the right by outspokenly opposing a gas tax increase. Pawlenty followed suit, signing a no-new-taxes pledge with the Taxpayers League, handcuffing his options before he was even elected.
Pawlenty made good on his promise. In 2005 and 2007 the governor gleefully vetoed a gas tax increase, even as Republicans like Ron Erhardt, who was among the sponsors of the measure both times, tried to get Pawlenty to see the necessity of it. "We were quite happy in 2007 because we got a bipartisan plan passed," Erhardt says. "The leadership in this party has dropped the ball on funding transportation issues, just because somebody, a big somebody, signed a no-new-taxes pledge."
A gas tax increase that went to a dedicated fund for transportation could have taken the metro's roadways and transit system out of the 1970s, and into the future. More importantly, the federal government requires that states match funding up to 20 percent to receive money earmarked for transportation infrastructure. "Go ask MnDOT how much money is sitting in Washington for us, that we left on the table because we don't have a gas tax," says a transportation lobbyist.
Mitigating factor: As much as any one person can shoulder the blame, Pawlenty looks culpable. The collapse happened on his watch, after all, and his lieutenant governor, whom he also appointed to be transportation commissioner, was supposed to know about MnDOT's alarming reports. But to his credit, Pawlenty has finally done an about face on the gas tax.
TRANSPORTATION COMMISSIONER
Carol Molnau
Molnau doesn't have the kind of technical background you'd expect from the person responsible for building and maintaining the state's transportation infrastructure. Raised on a farm in Lafayette, Molnau has demonstrated her rural bona fides by milking cows, and once famously beat former Governor Jesse Ventura in a keg-throwing contest.
But after Pawlenty tapped her to be his running mate, and the two breezed into office in 2002, she soon found herself taking on a second job as transportation commissioner. Although it may have seemed an odd fit, the appointment posed two advantages for Pawlenty: It allowed him to cut the $108,000 salary typically paid to someone in that position, and put an anti-tax ally in charge of an agency with an annual budget of $2 billion.
Upon taking over the two roles, Molnau vowed that she would bring "reform and accountability" to MnDOT. It's been all downhill since then. She sparred with the governor over the North Star commuter line, and due to a controversy over bids, delayed the much-needed overhaul of the Crosstown and I-35W Commons south of Minneapolis. Molnau has toed the line against an increase in a gas tax, and spoken out against funding for mass transit, emphasizing politics over policy. As a result, she has overseen the steady decline—by fiscal neglect—of the state's road and bridge infrastructure.
Mitigating factors: Molnau was in China when the bridge collapsed, which is somewhat symbolic of her tenure as transportation commissioner. But it's not her fault she was appointed to a job she wasn't qualified to do. After all, as Molnau told the Star Tribune, "Do I look at the bridge inspection reports? No ... I really believe we have professionals trained to do that."
MnDOT
Less than 24 hours after the bridge collapsed, Dan Dorgan, MnDOT's top bridge engineer, gamely faced a throng of TV cameras and microphones. Sweating profusely, Dorgan looked like a man undergoing an exceptionally painful colonoscopy. Here was a geek used to spending intimate time with bridge blueprints and inspection reports being forced to answer the question on everyone's mind: How could this happen?
Dorgan walked the press through the basics of bridge inspection, detailing the history of the I-35W bridge and defining the suddenly trenchant term "structurally deficient." But when asked if he was convinced that MnDOT had done everything it could to insure that the bridge was structurally sound, Dorgan provided his most revealing answer: "In light of what happened, I would say we thought we had done all we could. Obviously something went terribly wrong."
MnDOT's dysfunction has been well documented. In 2003, the Star Tribune ran a series of stories detailing myriad problems within the agency, from shoddy contracting to profligate spending to low-balling property owners when purchasing land for highways. To cite just one example of misplaced priorities, in 2002 MnDOT paid $10,750 to a conference speaker to detail "The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Harley Davidson."
MnDOT knew there was a problem with the bridge and was in a position to do something about it. In 2006, URS Corporation, one of the largest engineering firms worldwide, released an in-depth study of the I-35W bridge and offered three possible courses of corrective action to ensure the structure's safety. MnDOT, despite heated internal debate, chose the cheapest option: continued inspections.
This decision was made despite numerous obstacles that made meticulous visual examinations of the bridge nearly impossible. In fact, the URS report pointed out that access to some of the most vulnerable portions of the bridge was "very limited." Inspectors struggled with piles of pigeon shit, bats, spider webs, poor lighting, and angry motorists, who occasionally expressed their frustration at lane closures by hurling debris at MnDOT workers.
In sum, MnDOT has all the hallmarks of a paranoid bureaucracy more concerned with safe-guarding its turf and reputation than actually building and maintaining the state's transportation infrastructure. Considering this dysfunctional state of affairs and the chronic under-funding of the department, it's a wonder that more bridges haven't crumbled.
Mitigating factors: MnDOT has no power over budgeting. The agency must make do with the insufficient financial resources allocated by the legislature and the governor. "The professional staff over there assembles the best research that they can," says Rick Krueger, executive director of the Minnesota Transportation Alliance, a coalition of businesses, labor, and local governments that advocates for better roadways. "There's been a glaring lack of funding in transportation investment that needs to be addressed."
The Taxpayers League
Locally, the Taxpayers League led the way for a new era of small-government starve-the-beasters, and no one banged the drum more loudly than its then-president, David Strom. As the 2002 election returns came in and it became clear that Republicans would win big, Strom was not shy in proclaiming victory. "One word: mandate," he told the Star Tribune.
Strom and the league had reason to crow: They helped elect a slew of their candidates, most of them signing a no-new-taxes pledge. Among them was gubernatorial candidate Tim Pawlenty.
In deference to his benefactors, Pawlenty led an unprecedented era of slash-and-burn politics, most of his policies heartily endorsed by Strom. In 2004, for instance, a Metro Transit bus strike instigated by Pawlenty was cheered by Strom and other anti-transit blowhards on the sidelines. And every time Pawlenty vetoed an increase in the gas tax, it wasn't hard to see the governor's pen was being directed by the Taxpayers League.
When word got around last week that Pawlenty was finally considering a gas tax hike in the face of the catastrophe, Strom, who is no longer the president of the league, piped up that Pawlenty had "panicked." But perhaps it's Strom and his ilk who are panicked, after realizing that their brand of bull-headed ideology hamstrings government to the point where it can't perform its most basic function: Protecting the citizenry.
Mitigating factor: Strom has moved on from his post as the head of the Taxpayers League, clearing the way for former State Rep. Phil Krinkie, whose hard-line stance on taxes has earned him the nickname Dr. "No."
STATE HOUSE MINORITY LEADER
Marty Seifert
The House minority leader has been Pawlenty's staunchest deputy in fighting DFL efforts to increase the gas tax in recent years, despite glaring holes in the state's transportation budget. It's now projected that over the next six years there will be an annual funding shortfall of $2.4 billion for transportation projects. Over the next two decades, the funding gap is expected to reach more than $30 billion
Last legislative session, Democrats attempted to staunch the ballooning deficit. The legislature approved a measure that would eventually raise the gas tax by 7.5 cents, which would have been the first gas tax hike since 1988.
But Seifert sneered at even this modest transporation fee. "Joe Sixpack back home does not need more tax increases," he said in March. "This is a morbidly obese tax increase."
Even with Seifert pooh-poohing it, the measure initially cleared the House and Senate with 11 Republican legislators joining their DFL colleagues in voting for it. But the margin in the House was just one vote over the two-thirds threshold needed to override a veto.
After Pawlenty spiked the bill, Seifert led an intense lobbying campaign to convince Republicans not to contradict the Governor. Those who had voted in favor were inundated with phone calls and emails. Eventually four Republicans (Jim Abeler, Bud Heidgerken, Dean Urdahl and Kathy Tingelstad) flipped their votes. The veto held.
"It was a loyalty to the Governor kind of thing," says Rep. Frank Hornstein (DFL-St. Paul), who sits on the transportation finance committee. "This was a huge issue for Marty Seifert."
Following the bridge collapse, Seifert has continued to insist that a gas tax increase is unnecessary.
Mitigating factor: Seifert was merely carrying water for the Governor. His spirited defense was at some level standard partisan politics.
The Bridge Builders
Kurt Fhurman, the inspector responsible for signing off on the I-35W bridge every year since 1994, thinks he knows who is responsible for the collapse.
"Go after the designer," Fhurman angrily told the New York Daily News several days after the collapse. "Go ask him why he did what he did."
The bridge was designed in 1961 by Sverdrup & Parcel, a prominent firm that also designed Busch Stadium in St. Louis, the Superdome in New Orleans, and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. The bridge was built between 1964 and 1967 by Industrial Construction Company and Hurcon Inc. Both businesses are now defunct.
Even though it's early in the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board is already raising questions about the bridge's design. One issue of concern: the bridge didn't have any piers built into the riverbed. It also lacked what are commonly referred to as "engineering redundancies"—back-up support built into the system to minimize damage if one part fails.
Last week, the NTSB and Federal Highway Authority focused on so-called gusset plates, steel sheets that connected the bridge's girders together. The inspectors said the plates may have been a design flaw.
Mitigating factor: To be fair, the bridge was built in a dark period of American construction. In the 1960s and early 1970s, builders and policy officials believed engineering had evolved to the point where bridges could be built on the cheap—a notion that disappeared just a few years after the I-35W bridge opened.
Progressive Contractors, Inc.
At the time of the bridge collapse, 18 employees from Progressive Contractors were in the midst of completing $2.4 million in repairs. The St. Michael-based construction company, founded in 1971, had been working on the bridge since early June. For two months, workers drilled into the surface with jackhammers, cut away pavement with saws, and poured concrete.
But what raised eyebrows about the work was the sheer volume of equipment and construction materials deployed on the bridge at the time of collapse. Federal authorities estimate that the bridge was supporting 100 tons of gravel, at least two semitrailers, and an unknown quantity of concrete, which weighs close to 100 pounds per cubic foot. Neither Progressive Contractors nor MnDOT conducted a study to scrutinize how the construction work might impact the bridge's safety.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters highlighted this potential factor in a statement released last week. "Given the questions being raised by the NTSB, it is vital that states remain mindful of the extra weight construction projects place on bridges," she said.
Progressive Contractors, which specializes in bridge and highway construction, maintains that it's not unusual to have that much equipment onsite. "Their people are just as baffled as everyone," says David Lillehaug, the attorney representing the company. "We're just scratching our heads with this."
Progressive Contractors also disputes reports that the bridge had been swaying prior to the collapse. "We have now met with every single worker who was on the bridge when it collapsed. None of them observed or reported any unusual swaying," said Tom Sloan, vice president of the company's bridge division, in a statement released last week.
But Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl, a University of California, Berkeley professor who is a bridge expert, says that construction activities may have been one factor in creating a "perfect storm" that led to the failure of the structure. "The last straw may be the construction," he says.
Mitigating factor: MnDOT's chief bridge engineer, Dan Dorgan, has said the I-35W bridge was built to meet military specifications, meaning that it should have been able to withstand bumper-to-bumper traffic of flatbeds carrying M1 Abrams tanks, which would be significantly heavier than the construction equipment and materials on the bridge at the time of the collapse.
The Previous Administrations
Remember the famous "Jesse Checks" that Governor Ventura put in everyone's mailbox? Those were heady times from 1999 to 2001, when the state was running a surplus and Governor Turnbuckle gave Minnesotans a rebate on sales tax collection. Everyone cheered because Jesse got us our money back.
Turns out popular policy isn't always good policy. Aside from looking wasteful when the state budget bottomed out in 2002, those funds could have gone to a roadway system that everyone knew was badly in need of an overhaul. In 2000, the rebate took some $200 million away from transportation needs. More saliently, Ventura also urged lawmakers to cut license tab registration fees that year, a move that depleted the highway trust fund by some $170 million annually.
Ventura wasn't the only governor who was shortsighted with transportation funding. For years, Arne Carlson said he was against an increase in the gas tax, and though the state Senate passed one in 1997, the measure didn't pass the House because Carlson wouldn't support it. For most of his tenure, Carlson was more interested in using tollbooths as a revenue source, but the idea never took off.
In short, both governors ignored the fact that our roadways were deteriorating.
Mitigating factors: The gas tax, which was last increased in 1988 from 17 to 20 cents a gallon, has long been unpopular with Minnesotans. The state was running budget surpluses during most of Ventura and Carlson's tenures in office, and raising taxes didn't seem necessary.
The Bureaucracy
Aside from a lack of money to get matching funds for federal projects, the many steps required for reviewing and planning Minnesota's roadways and interstates is hopelessly tangled up in red tape.
For example, federal law requires that a regional planning agency oversee transportation dollars sent to the state. For the seven-county Twin Cities area, that agency is the Metropolitan Council. The council takes its cue from the Transportation Advisory Board, which was created by the state legislature in 1974. The board is responsible for reviewing MnDOT plans and reports, and issuing recommendations to the Met Council, which accepts or rejects the board's recommendation as a whole. Then the council takes its case to the legislature and the governor's office, which decide which projects need to be funded.
The biggest problem with the system, of course, is that urgent projects get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, and pet projects jump to the head of the line—especially new construction rather than repair, because, politically speaking, such ventures are far sexier to lawmakers and constituents alike. In other words, the system is not only arcane, but also highly susceptible to politicization.
Mitigating factors: In recent years, the Met Council has had its work cut out for it, with folks like Pawlenty, Strom, and a host of other local neo-con think-tankers being openly hostile to the regional planning agency. Even if the Met Council and MnDOT had been working in perfect concert and sounding the bells for the right projects at the right time, it's likely their pleas would have fallen on deaf ears.
The Federal Government
Blaming the collapse of a bridge in Minnesota on the war in Iraq might seem like a parody of knee-jerk liberalism, but that doesn't mean there isn't some truth in it.
Of course, inadequate federal funding of transportation infrastructure is a phenomenon that precedes the present administration. Former DFL Sen. Dave Durenberger recalls the same frustration two decades earlier during the Reagan years. "I was trying to get colleagues and the president to see that our federal highway system was deteriorating at an alarming rate, but no one wanted to hear it," he says.
Even so, it's impossible not to think longingly of the $450 billion-plus we've squandered in Iraq. Terrorists might not have blown up the I-35W bridge, but they certainly distracted us from the pressing problems at home.
Mitigating factor: Donald Rumsfeld isn't transportation secretary.
Shiny New Toys
Politicians like to build things. They like ribbon cuttings and newspaper photos and structures bearing their own illustrious names. Proof of this phenomenon? The Robert C. Byrd Institute for Advanced Flexible Manufacturing.
Closer to home, the same phenomenon partly explains why the legislature can find half a billion dollars to spend on the Hiawatha light rail line, but can't scrape up sufficient resources to maintain roads and bridges. Or to cite a more egregious example, it's why, when all is said and done, we will likely have spent somewhere in the area of $2 billion dollars on sports stadiums. Nobody gets a PR boost when MnDOT allocates additional funds to reinforce gusset plates.
"Bridges actually are in better shape than a lot of other parts of our infrastructure," says Kent Harries, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. "It's going to get worse, and it's going to get exponentially worse."
Mitigating factor: The argument pitting highways against public transit is wrongheaded. The truth is that substantial investment will have to be made in both to keep up with the state's transportation needs.
It's amazing how a tangle of steel and concrete and bodies in the Mississippi River can concentrate minds and galvanize action.
It wasn't 72 hours after the bridge collapsed that Governor Pawlenty was conceding the need to increase the gas tax. Congress signed off on a $250 million emergency appropriations bill before the week was over. By the end of last week, plans to build a new bridge were on the fast track. The goal is to have it finished by the end of 2008.
The investigation into what went wrong and how to prevent such tragedies in the future is a murkier business. The NTSB immediately had investigators on the ground poking through the wreckage. Eventually, the bridge will be reconstructed, piece by piece, much like a crashed airplane, in an effort to discover which part failed first.
But whatever combination of factors are ultimately deemed to have resulted in the dramatic collapse of the bridge, it may turn out that the biggest problem had nothing to do with concrete or steel but rather something much more human: a failure of planning and public policy.
Read more & see photos
Monday, July 23, 2007
NTTA on road to more tolls - North Texas Tollway Authority set to expand vision, role with new projects
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER - The Dallas Morning News - Sunday, July 22, 2007
The North Texas Tollway Authority's second decade promises to be nothing like its first.
Today, at age 10, NTTA is promising to expand its focus beyond Dallas and Collin counties to mesh with state and local plans that will radically increase the number of toll roads in North Texas.
As a result, the authority is poised to exert more influence than ever before over the way North Texas drivers get from one place to another.
In addition to building the 26-mile State Highway 121 toll road, NTTA has been asked to build or operate at least five other toll roads, and will partner in several other "priced" projects such as pay-to-use HOV lanes.
Critics: Change needed
Critics caution, however, that as NTTA plays a bigger role in solving transportation problems, it will need to do a better job of paying attention to the whole region.
"I have nothing against them, except for their history," said Denton City Council member Pete Kamp, who said NTTA has long ignored Denton and Tarrant counties. "They are telling us that they are now going to be, and I trust them to be, good to their word. But in the past they've simply been in Dallas and Collin counties."
Bill Hale, the engineer in charge of the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation, said North Texas' transportation solutions have long depended on pooling resources from the state, the region's elected officials and the toll authority. "It's a three-legged stool, and everyone has a role to play," he said.
If that's true, NTTA's leg is about to get a lot stronger, as Mr. Hale conceded in an interview last week.
And that means it will be under more scrutiny, said Mike Nowels, a former Regional Transportation Council member from Lewisville. Answerable only to an independent board of directors, the authority has had too little oversight, he said.
"Does the Dallas North Tollway from [Interstate] 635 south into Dallas, is it really up to standards? Is it anywhere close?" Mr. Nowels asked. "Why hasn't the tollway authority invested in fixing it? It's gridlock every morning and gridlock every evening – and it's been that way for 20 years."
Optimism
NTTA officials and Mr. Morris said negotiations over Highway 121 are well ahead of schedule. An agreement is expected to be ready before the Texas Transportation Commission meets in Sugar Land on Thursday – a month before the deadline.
If the deadline is not met, the contract will go to Cintra, the Spanish firm that won preliminary approval in February to build the road.
Many of the Regional Transportation Council members who voted to let Cintra keep the contract said they now think NTTA will do a good job.
Mesquite City Council member John Heiman Jr. said many of the "no" votes were cast in opposition to the way NTTA was allowed to make a late bid after Cintra had been named the preliminary winner.
"I didn't vote against the NTTA; I was simply opposed to the process. It was awful," Mr. Heiman said.
Most RTC members have put the differences over Highway 121 behind them and are focused on building the region's badly needed roads, he said.
"There is so much need – and I am not talking about wants, I am talking basic needs of transportation – we're going to need a big head of steam to get it all done," Mr. Heiman said.
Mr. Morris said NTTA must be given the support it needs to live up to its commitments on Highway 121 and other roads it has promised to help build.
"We want them to succeed," Mr. Morris said. "We're going to do everything we can to assist them."
NTTA chairman Paul Wageman said board members have benefited from criticism.
That path ahead, he said, includes an increased focus on communities in Tarrant and Denton counties who have long felt ignored by NTTA.
Higher tolls ahead
Still, what has changed most of all is not NTTA, but the way local officials and transportation planners have so enthusiastically embraced tolling as a road-building strategy.
That would have been hard to imagine in June 1997, when the Legislature voted to create NTTA.
Former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson helped lead the charge to persuade lawmakers to dissolve the Texas Turnpike Authority and replace it with NTTA.
At the time, the authority's only job was to maintain the Dallas North Tollway and collect millions of dollars in tolls. In time, it used those funds and others to build the President George Bush Turnpike, and has since embarked on a handful of other, smaller projects.
But Mr. Jackson, chancellor of the University of North Texas system since 2002, said the philosophy about the role of toll roads in the highway system a decade ago barely resembles what has emerged since the Highway 121 debate began.
These days, the idea is to set the toll rates high enough to create a rich revenue stream that can be used as collateral for massive upfront loans from banks or bondholders.
In the Highway 121 case, for example, NTTA has promised to pay the state $3.3 billion in cash to help finance a stream of other North Texas projects. The money will come from the sale of bonds secured by future toll revenue that exceeds what is needed to build and operate Highway 121 in Denton and Collin counties.
"Obviously money talks," Mr. Jackson said. Still, he said the new approach is necessary because of the paucity of funds from more traditional sources such as state and federal gas taxes.
Mr. Morris agreed.
"We're in such a financial crisis when it comes to transportation that the gas taxes are basically paying for the maintenance of the roads we already have," Mr. Morris said. "Ten years from now the only improvements we will be able to make will be the ones that are paid for by toll roads."
Fairness of toll rate
Some local leaders say they can stomach the increasing number of toll roads. But they say it's wrong to abandon the old policy of keeping toll rates as low as possible.
Frisco City Manager George Purefoy is among them. It's bad enough, he said, that Frisco's two main avenues to the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area – Highway 121 and Dallas North Tollway – both will be tolled.
But what's worse, he said, is that Frisco drivers will be paying artificially high rates just so NTTA can borrow the billions it has promised to pay upfront. He says the higher toll rates amount to an extra tax on drivers unlikely to use the roads on which the extra money is spent.
The Frisco City Council is considering filing suit to try to block the toll road, Mayor Mike Simpson said, but no decision has been made.
Last week, Mr. Morris said that legal threat could make it more difficult for NTTA to close the Highway 121 deal within the deadline.
In the meantime, drivers may need to get used to paying higher tolls – a price transportation officials such as Mr. Morris said is needed if residents want to ease the congestion that continues to clog North Texas roads.
Read more
The North Texas Tollway Authority's second decade promises to be nothing like its first.
Today, at age 10, NTTA is promising to expand its focus beyond Dallas and Collin counties to mesh with state and local plans that will radically increase the number of toll roads in North Texas.
As a result, the authority is poised to exert more influence than ever before over the way North Texas drivers get from one place to another.
"I call it the maturing of the NTTA," said Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments. "Ten years ago, the NTTA's attitude may have been, 'We'll do a few projects, but we're not interested in managed lanes, or electronic toll roads. We basically build these big fat cash lanes.' " But that's changing fast, Mr. Morris said.
In addition to building the 26-mile State Highway 121 toll road, NTTA has been asked to build or operate at least five other toll roads, and will partner in several other "priced" projects such as pay-to-use HOV lanes.
Critics: Change needed
Critics caution, however, that as NTTA plays a bigger role in solving transportation problems, it will need to do a better job of paying attention to the whole region.
"I have nothing against them, except for their history," said Denton City Council member Pete Kamp, who said NTTA has long ignored Denton and Tarrant counties. "They are telling us that they are now going to be, and I trust them to be, good to their word. But in the past they've simply been in Dallas and Collin counties."
Bill Hale, the engineer in charge of the Dallas district of the Texas Department of Transportation, said North Texas' transportation solutions have long depended on pooling resources from the state, the region's elected officials and the toll authority. "It's a three-legged stool, and everyone has a role to play," he said.
If that's true, NTTA's leg is about to get a lot stronger, as Mr. Hale conceded in an interview last week.
And that means it will be under more scrutiny, said Mike Nowels, a former Regional Transportation Council member from Lewisville. Answerable only to an independent board of directors, the authority has had too little oversight, he said.
"Does the Dallas North Tollway from [Interstate] 635 south into Dallas, is it really up to standards? Is it anywhere close?" Mr. Nowels asked. "Why hasn't the tollway authority invested in fixing it? It's gridlock every morning and gridlock every evening – and it's been that way for 20 years."
Optimism
NTTA officials and Mr. Morris said negotiations over Highway 121 are well ahead of schedule. An agreement is expected to be ready before the Texas Transportation Commission meets in Sugar Land on Thursday – a month before the deadline.
If the deadline is not met, the contract will go to Cintra, the Spanish firm that won preliminary approval in February to build the road.
Many of the Regional Transportation Council members who voted to let Cintra keep the contract said they now think NTTA will do a good job.
Mesquite City Council member John Heiman Jr. said many of the "no" votes were cast in opposition to the way NTTA was allowed to make a late bid after Cintra had been named the preliminary winner.
"I didn't vote against the NTTA; I was simply opposed to the process. It was awful," Mr. Heiman said.
Most RTC members have put the differences over Highway 121 behind them and are focused on building the region's badly needed roads, he said.
"There is so much need – and I am not talking about wants, I am talking basic needs of transportation – we're going to need a big head of steam to get it all done," Mr. Heiman said.
Mr. Morris said NTTA must be given the support it needs to live up to its commitments on Highway 121 and other roads it has promised to help build.
"We want them to succeed," Mr. Morris said. "We're going to do everything we can to assist them."
NTTA chairman Paul Wageman said board members have benefited from criticism.
"I think it has been very instructive, and we're changing," Mr. Wageman said. "We're having to grow and adapt to a changing environment. Perhaps we were a little slow to adapt to that as a board, but the board is now fully focused on our road ahead."
That path ahead, he said, includes an increased focus on communities in Tarrant and Denton counties who have long felt ignored by NTTA.
Higher tolls ahead
Still, what has changed most of all is not NTTA, but the way local officials and transportation planners have so enthusiastically embraced tolling as a road-building strategy.
That would have been hard to imagine in June 1997, when the Legislature voted to create NTTA.
Former Dallas County Judge Lee Jackson helped lead the charge to persuade lawmakers to dissolve the Texas Turnpike Authority and replace it with NTTA.
At the time, the authority's only job was to maintain the Dallas North Tollway and collect millions of dollars in tolls. In time, it used those funds and others to build the President George Bush Turnpike, and has since embarked on a handful of other, smaller projects.
But Mr. Jackson, chancellor of the University of North Texas system since 2002, said the philosophy about the role of toll roads in the highway system a decade ago barely resembles what has emerged since the Highway 121 debate began.
"When the NTTA was formed, the idea was that every toll road would be built and operated to the lowest possible cost to the drivers," Mr. Jackson said. "The idea was to set the smallest possible toll rates."
These days, the idea is to set the toll rates high enough to create a rich revenue stream that can be used as collateral for massive upfront loans from banks or bondholders.
In the Highway 121 case, for example, NTTA has promised to pay the state $3.3 billion in cash to help finance a stream of other North Texas projects. The money will come from the sale of bonds secured by future toll revenue that exceeds what is needed to build and operate Highway 121 in Denton and Collin counties.
"Obviously money talks," Mr. Jackson said. Still, he said the new approach is necessary because of the paucity of funds from more traditional sources such as state and federal gas taxes.
Mr. Morris agreed.
"We're in such a financial crisis when it comes to transportation that the gas taxes are basically paying for the maintenance of the roads we already have," Mr. Morris said. "Ten years from now the only improvements we will be able to make will be the ones that are paid for by toll roads."
Fairness of toll rate
Some local leaders say they can stomach the increasing number of toll roads. But they say it's wrong to abandon the old policy of keeping toll rates as low as possible.
Frisco City Manager George Purefoy is among them. It's bad enough, he said, that Frisco's two main avenues to the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area – Highway 121 and Dallas North Tollway – both will be tolled.
But what's worse, he said, is that Frisco drivers will be paying artificially high rates just so NTTA can borrow the billions it has promised to pay upfront. He says the higher toll rates amount to an extra tax on drivers unlikely to use the roads on which the extra money is spent.
"Everyone wants to keep focusing on how much money the region is getting from this project, and no one seems to care how much more drivers are going to have to pay," he said. "Our drivers are going to have to pay a toll, an extra tax and then the gas tax, too."
The Frisco City Council is considering filing suit to try to block the toll road, Mayor Mike Simpson said, but no decision has been made.
Last week, Mr. Morris said that legal threat could make it more difficult for NTTA to close the Highway 121 deal within the deadline.
In the meantime, drivers may need to get used to paying higher tolls – a price transportation officials such as Mr. Morris said is needed if residents want to ease the congestion that continues to clog North Texas roads.
Read more
Sunday, July 22, 2007
TxDOT’s Sunset Review Kick-Off Party & Media Blitz
tKeeping An Eye on Williamson County - Friday, July 20, 2007
In what looks like a media blitz to show that TxDOT was right all along, and to justify it’s continuing existence in relation to it’s upcoming Sunset review, TxDOT this week is holding it’s Texas Transportation Forum toll-gasm conference.
Much of the focus has been on a draft report of a soon to be released “independent” report - TxDOT paid $3.5 million for the report - that says:
Texas needs more toll roads, and drivers should pay more to use them, an external audit of the Texas Department of Transportation suggested Wednesday.
(Kuff’s response):
I like that “priced to reflect the value - including the time saved” line. Because, of course, if you keep your toll roads expensive enough to guarantee that they’re never crowded, then it’s a self-perpetuating justification. Better yet, if you ensure that the remaining non-toll roads are sufficiently decrepit and jammed up, you’ll also have a built-in reason to keep raising tolls in the future. What more could a local toll road authority want?
A TxDOT paid for “independent” audit that reaffirms TxDOT’s toll every road stance. That’s just a happy coincidence for TxDOT I’m sure. Although the forum is billed as a chance to, “Experience the vision. Share your ideas. Join the conversation. Keep Texas moving”, in reality it appears to be more a way to bring lawmakers and those who make money off of government transportation deals together:
…the need for toll financing and other alternatives to gasoline taxes is a major theme of the conference that brought together public officials and private contractors from across the state.
The audience that packed the Hilton ballroom found in each chair a Texas Department of Transportation brochure titled “TxDot: Open for Business — A Guide to Accelerating Transportation Projects.” [.PDF]
The booklet explains various strategies approved by the Legislature in 2003 to supplement tax revenue with toll financing, public-private partnerships and regional mobility authorities.
The conference coincided with the release of an audit by TxDOT, suggesting the state’s best chance for keeping up is to build more toll roads with higher fees.
Now the report, as Move It! explains, has one point that may be worth further exploration. It’s a plan based on making ALL drivers pay a user fee based on vehicle miles traveled:
A long-term answer is to switch from a tax on gas to a tax on how much people drive, called a vehicle miles traveled charge or VMT charge. Oregon finished testing such a system in March and a report is due this summer.
“Texas needs to lay the ground work to move to a VMT charge over the next 20 years,” the report says. (see Oregon Test [.PDF]).
The technology for the implementation may still be a little ways off but this has the potential to be a fair, broad-based tax that charges drivers for the amount of driving they do.
One last thing. Gov. Perry was quoted as saying this:
And the fuel tax “has problems on its face,” he said. Unlike toll roads, which typically have a free alternative, fuel taxes are paid by all drivers, and hit rural residents hardest.
“The boys out in Lubbock, Odessa and Marfa really don’t see the benefit in it for them,” he said.
When Gov. Perry runs around the state telling Texans that we have to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, and take away precious farmland and family legacies, he says it must be done to benefit all of Texas. The “conservative” staple excuse of using economic development as the reason when it benefits their cause. But in those sentences he’s refuting that statement by saying that toll roads only benefit urban/suburban Texans. Which is it governor? Either our highways are built for the benefit of ALL Texans and should be funded by ALL Texans or they shouldn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
Again I’ll refer you back to EOW’s earlier post on the “independent” audit, It’s Not The Size Of The Shorfall, It’s How It’s Made Up That Matters. No matter how we want to slice it, the ultimate question is, How do Texans want to pay to make up for the disrepair and neglect our state leaders, and ultimately ourselves, have allowed our transportation infrastructure to fall into in this state? EOW believes the best way to do this is in the fairest, and most broad-based, way possible, which at this time happens to be raising and indexing the gas tax.
Read more
In what looks like a media blitz to show that TxDOT was right all along, and to justify it’s continuing existence in relation to it’s upcoming Sunset review, TxDOT this week is holding it’s Texas Transportation Forum toll-gasm conference.
Much of the focus has been on a draft report of a soon to be released “independent” report - TxDOT paid $3.5 million for the report - that says:
Texas needs more toll roads, and drivers should pay more to use them, an external audit of the Texas Department of Transportation suggested Wednesday.
(Kuff’s response):
I like that “priced to reflect the value - including the time saved” line. Because, of course, if you keep your toll roads expensive enough to guarantee that they’re never crowded, then it’s a self-perpetuating justification. Better yet, if you ensure that the remaining non-toll roads are sufficiently decrepit and jammed up, you’ll also have a built-in reason to keep raising tolls in the future. What more could a local toll road authority want?
A TxDOT paid for “independent” audit that reaffirms TxDOT’s toll every road stance. That’s just a happy coincidence for TxDOT I’m sure. Although the forum is billed as a chance to, “Experience the vision. Share your ideas. Join the conversation. Keep Texas moving”, in reality it appears to be more a way to bring lawmakers and those who make money off of government transportation deals together:
…the need for toll financing and other alternatives to gasoline taxes is a major theme of the conference that brought together public officials and private contractors from across the state.
The audience that packed the Hilton ballroom found in each chair a Texas Department of Transportation brochure titled “TxDot: Open for Business — A Guide to Accelerating Transportation Projects.” [.PDF]
The booklet explains various strategies approved by the Legislature in 2003 to supplement tax revenue with toll financing, public-private partnerships and regional mobility authorities.
The conference coincided with the release of an audit by TxDOT, suggesting the state’s best chance for keeping up is to build more toll roads with higher fees.
Now the report, as Move It! explains, has one point that may be worth further exploration. It’s a plan based on making ALL drivers pay a user fee based on vehicle miles traveled:
A long-term answer is to switch from a tax on gas to a tax on how much people drive, called a vehicle miles traveled charge or VMT charge. Oregon finished testing such a system in March and a report is due this summer.
“Texas needs to lay the ground work to move to a VMT charge over the next 20 years,” the report says. (see Oregon Test [.PDF]).
The technology for the implementation may still be a little ways off but this has the potential to be a fair, broad-based tax that charges drivers for the amount of driving they do.
One last thing. Gov. Perry was quoted as saying this:
And the fuel tax “has problems on its face,” he said. Unlike toll roads, which typically have a free alternative, fuel taxes are paid by all drivers, and hit rural residents hardest.
“The boys out in Lubbock, Odessa and Marfa really don’t see the benefit in it for them,” he said.
When Gov. Perry runs around the state telling Texans that we have to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, and take away precious farmland and family legacies, he says it must be done to benefit all of Texas. The “conservative” staple excuse of using economic development as the reason when it benefits their cause. But in those sentences he’s refuting that statement by saying that toll roads only benefit urban/suburban Texans. Which is it governor? Either our highways are built for the benefit of ALL Texans and should be funded by ALL Texans or they shouldn’t. You can’t have it both ways.
Again I’ll refer you back to EOW’s earlier post on the “independent” audit, It’s Not The Size Of The Shorfall, It’s How It’s Made Up That Matters. No matter how we want to slice it, the ultimate question is, How do Texans want to pay to make up for the disrepair and neglect our state leaders, and ultimately ourselves, have allowed our transportation infrastructure to fall into in this state? EOW believes the best way to do this is in the fairest, and most broad-based, way possible, which at this time happens to be raising and indexing the gas tax.
Read more
Friday, July 20, 2007
Perry reiterates toll road support
Governor tells builders the need for road funds will overcome critics
By RAD SALLEE - Houston Chronicle - July 19, 2007
AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry told road builders at the Texas Transportation Forum here Thursday that he stands firm in his support for toll roads and public-private partnerships despite some setbacks in the past legislative session.
"When you have big dreams," he said, people tell you, "You can't get there from here. But I assure you we can get there from here, and we're going to get there together."
Perry said traditional sources of road funding — "a trickle of federal funds and a gas tax that few legislators would even think of raising" — aren't nearly enough to meet the state's needs.
"There isn't even enough money to maintain our current system," he said.
And the fuel tax "has problems on its face," he said. Unlike toll roads, which typically have a free alternative, fuel taxes are paid by all drivers, and hit rural residents hardest.
Driving the private sector
Perry said even the prospect of the state contracting with the private sector to build and operate toll roads is paying off.
"Projects that local toll road authorities would not have bid on a few years ago are now attracting very strong interest because private companies are now competing to build those same projects," he said.
This was an apparent reference to the North Texas Tollway Authority's offer to pay the state $3.3 billion to build and operate for profit in a 50-year lease, a segment of Texas 121 in the Dallas area. The offer topped a previous $2.8 billion bid from the Spanish firm Cintra.
"They may never say it," Perry said of lawmakers opposed to such long-term public-private toll partnerships, "but the Legislature admitted we were on the right track.
"While they were calling for a moratorium on toll roads, on one hand, they were insisting on toll road projects in their own districts because their constituents wanted to see things moving. They wanted to see those roads built."
Read more
By RAD SALLEE - Houston Chronicle - July 19, 2007
AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry told road builders at the Texas Transportation Forum here Thursday that he stands firm in his support for toll roads and public-private partnerships despite some setbacks in the past legislative session.
"When you have big dreams," he said, people tell you, "You can't get there from here. But I assure you we can get there from here, and we're going to get there together."
Perry said traditional sources of road funding — "a trickle of federal funds and a gas tax that few legislators would even think of raising" — aren't nearly enough to meet the state's needs.
"There isn't even enough money to maintain our current system," he said.
And the fuel tax "has problems on its face," he said. Unlike toll roads, which typically have a free alternative, fuel taxes are paid by all drivers, and hit rural residents hardest.
"The boys out in Lubbock, Odessa and Marfa really don't see the benefit
in it for them," he said.
"If we don't build roads with innovative financing and tolls, roads are not going to be built in our state," he said.
Driving the private sector
Perry said even the prospect of the state contracting with the private sector to build and operate toll roads is paying off.
"Projects that local toll road authorities would not have bid on a few years ago are now attracting very strong interest because private companies are now competing to build those same projects," he said.
This was an apparent reference to the North Texas Tollway Authority's offer to pay the state $3.3 billion to build and operate for profit in a 50-year lease, a segment of Texas 121 in the Dallas area. The offer topped a previous $2.8 billion bid from the Spanish firm Cintra.
"They may never say it," Perry said of lawmakers opposed to such long-term public-private toll partnerships, "but the Legislature admitted we were on the right track.
"While they were calling for a moratorium on toll roads, on one hand, they were insisting on toll road projects in their own districts because their constituents wanted to see things moving. They wanted to see those roads built."
Read more
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Governor emphasis on tollways, private road-builders has generated urban and rural unrest
By Ben Wear - AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF - Sunday, August 20, 2006
Excerpts from a long story last year on Perry's transportation policy.
Perry, with his famously well-coiffed look and perfectly tailored suits, surely doesn't look the part of a revolutionary, and he rejects that characterization. But he acknowledges that transportation is the area where he made the most "wide-sweeping" changes.
Perry declared the gasoline tax a lame duck, dismissing talk of raising it. Perry and his allies decreed that all new road projects would be evaluated for tolls. They contemplated slapping tolls on existing roads, then backed off after a public outcry.
Perry in early 2002 outlined what seemed to be a pie-in-the-sky plan for 4,000 miles of rural toll roads called the Trans-Texas Corridor. After hearing people scoff for more than two years, Perry introduced some Spaniards who said they'd spend $7.2 billion on the first 300-mile piece, including a $1.2 billion payment to the state. And Perry's Department of Transportation declared Texas "open for business," inviting private companies — foreign or domestic — to privately finance and operate the next generation of Texas expressways and railroads.
"What is happening in Texas on public-private partnerships is being watched by every state in the union and several foreign countries," Perry said during a late July interview in his Capitol office.
"When I parachuted in here on Dec. 21, 2000, I inherited a state that had huge infrastructure challenges."
Gas tax not enough
Evaluating just how huge that challenge was — is it a crisis or just an emerging problem? — has involved an escalating war of statistics over the past couple of years.
The state's population has increased more than 20 percent since 1990 and annual miles traveled on the state's roads have gone up about 50 percent. Meanwhile, the Texas highway system, with increasing maintenance costs and more expensive urban construction needs, grew only 4 percent during that decade and a half.
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from those numbers, one borne out by most people's experience behind the wheel, is that Texas roads are more congested than they were 15 years ago.
The state Transportation Department's budget, meanwhile, has tripled since 1990, including an 80 percent jump from the budget Perry inherited from George W. Bush to this year's $7.7 billion spending plan.
Perry and his people say that's still not nearly enough to deal with the state's transportation needs now or, especially, in the future. Using figures gleaned by asking local transportation planners what they would build if money were no object, they say the state will have $86 billion in unmet transportation needs over the next 25 years. [NOTE: Perry's Governor's Taskforce on Transportation later revised this down to a $44 billion shortfall.]
They say the only way to close that gap, to extinguish the blaze, as it were, is to put tolls on every road you can and recruit private capital to build as many new toll roads as possible. Increasing the state gasoline tax, frozen at 20 cents a gallon since 1991, is not an option, Perry and his fellow GOP legislative leaders say, particularly with unleaded gas selling for close to $3 a gallon. But that was already his position when gas was selling for well under $2 a gallon.
...A few cents, in Perry's view, would be irrelevant. Each penny raises about $100 million in a year, or enough for one fair-sized freeway interchange with flyover bridges. So a 20-cent increase, which would give Texas the highest gas tax of any state, would bring in an extra $2 billion a year. Perry says that wouldn't be nearly enough to return Texas' transportation system to its former lofty status among states, particularly as hybrid vehicles and other improvements from Detroit increase gas efficiency and cause gas tax revenue to sag.
A 20-cents-a-gallon increase in the tax would cost the average driver about $100 a year. That's much less than a driver regularly commuting on a toll road would pay. The U.S. 183-A tollway due to open next year (in Austin) will cost $2 for one trip through, or about $1,000 a year for a five-day-a-week commuter.
Read more
Excerpts from a long story last year on Perry's transportation policy.
Perry, with his famously well-coiffed look and perfectly tailored suits, surely doesn't look the part of a revolutionary, and he rejects that characterization. But he acknowledges that transportation is the area where he made the most "wide-sweeping" changes.
Perry declared the gasoline tax a lame duck, dismissing talk of raising it. Perry and his allies decreed that all new road projects would be evaluated for tolls. They contemplated slapping tolls on existing roads, then backed off after a public outcry.
Perry in early 2002 outlined what seemed to be a pie-in-the-sky plan for 4,000 miles of rural toll roads called the Trans-Texas Corridor. After hearing people scoff for more than two years, Perry introduced some Spaniards who said they'd spend $7.2 billion on the first 300-mile piece, including a $1.2 billion payment to the state. And Perry's Department of Transportation declared Texas "open for business," inviting private companies — foreign or domestic — to privately finance and operate the next generation of Texas expressways and railroads.
"What is happening in Texas on public-private partnerships is being watched by every state in the union and several foreign countries," Perry said during a late July interview in his Capitol office.
"When I parachuted in here on Dec. 21, 2000, I inherited a state that had huge infrastructure challenges."
Gas tax not enough
Evaluating just how huge that challenge was — is it a crisis or just an emerging problem? — has involved an escalating war of statistics over the past couple of years.
The state's population has increased more than 20 percent since 1990 and annual miles traveled on the state's roads have gone up about 50 percent. Meanwhile, the Texas highway system, with increasing maintenance costs and more expensive urban construction needs, grew only 4 percent during that decade and a half.
The inescapable conclusion to be drawn from those numbers, one borne out by most people's experience behind the wheel, is that Texas roads are more congested than they were 15 years ago.
The state Transportation Department's budget, meanwhile, has tripled since 1990, including an 80 percent jump from the budget Perry inherited from George W. Bush to this year's $7.7 billion spending plan.
Perry and his people say that's still not nearly enough to deal with the state's transportation needs now or, especially, in the future. Using figures gleaned by asking local transportation planners what they would build if money were no object, they say the state will have $86 billion in unmet transportation needs over the next 25 years. [NOTE: Perry's Governor's Taskforce on Transportation later revised this down to a $44 billion shortfall.]
They say the only way to close that gap, to extinguish the blaze, as it were, is to put tolls on every road you can and recruit private capital to build as many new toll roads as possible. Increasing the state gasoline tax, frozen at 20 cents a gallon since 1991, is not an option, Perry and his fellow GOP legislative leaders say, particularly with unleaded gas selling for close to $3 a gallon. But that was already his position when gas was selling for well under $2 a gallon.
...A few cents, in Perry's view, would be irrelevant. Each penny raises about $100 million in a year, or enough for one fair-sized freeway interchange with flyover bridges. So a 20-cent increase, which would give Texas the highest gas tax of any state, would bring in an extra $2 billion a year. Perry says that wouldn't be nearly enough to return Texas' transportation system to its former lofty status among states, particularly as hybrid vehicles and other improvements from Detroit increase gas efficiency and cause gas tax revenue to sag.
A 20-cents-a-gallon increase in the tax would cost the average driver about $100 a year. That's much less than a driver regularly commuting on a toll road would pay. The U.S. 183-A tollway due to open next year (in Austin) will cost $2 for one trip through, or about $1,000 a year for a five-day-a-week commuter.
Read more
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