While the public hearing on toll roads droned on inside the Capital Extension auditorium around noon, the man responsible for today’s show took a few minutes to share what he sees as the big picture with reporters outside.
“The real focus has to be on public-private parterships” for toll roads, said state Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee. “The Trans-Texas Corridor will take care of itself eventually. In fact, there’s a high probability they’re only one gubernatorial election from being abolished.”
The more insidious public policy issue, from Carona’s point of view, is the Texas Department of Transportation’s burgeoning use of so-called “comprehensive development agreements” where it contracts with private companies to build, operate and collect the profits from toll roads. That’s the approach being used on the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor, a network of cross-state toll roads promoted by Gov. Rick Perry.
But the department is also beginning to use such agreements for purely urban roads, agreeing this week with Spanish company Cintra for Cintra and its partners to take over the existing Texas 121 toll road north of Dallas and extend it. Under the company’s winning bid, it would pay the state $2.1 billion up-front and at least another $800 million over 50 years for the right to run the 26-mile road.
That bonanza, and others like it, will allow the state to build more highway projects faster. But it will also, Carona said, saddle drivers with the highest possible tolls for decades to come. Carona wants the Transportation Department to voluntarily pull back on such agreements, and he supports a bill he said that will soon be filed to put a moratorium on private road agreements with the state.
Beyond all that, Carona believes the Legislature was wrong to give the Transportation Department as much license as it has to build toll roads and use excess money from those roads for other transportation projects.
“Is a toll a toll, or is it to be allowed to be a tax?” Carona said. “Today’s tolls are just disguised taxes.”
Carona said he and his fellow legislators over his 19 years in the Legislature put the Transportation Department in a bad position by declining to raise the state gas tax, creating a transportation funding shortfall that now runs to the tens of billions.
“Everyone of us, myself included, are to blame,” Carona said. “But when you make a mistake, in politics just as in life, the best thing to do is correct it. It’s incumbent on us to change bad law.”
The bad law, in Carona’s view, are two massive transportation bills passed by the Legislature in 2003 and 2005. That 2003 bill, among many other things, authorized the Trans-Texas Corridor and expanded what could be done with public-private partnerships on roads.
Will any of this — raising the gas tax, limiting private road deals — happen this session? Carona is pessimistic, given that House Transportation Committee chairman Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County, and Perry are fully supportive of what the Transportation Department has been doing.
“I believe the majority of the House and a majority of the Senate, if given the chance, would vote to substantially curtail the power of the Department of Transportation,” Carona said. “The people of Texas, the people who hired us, want change. …Whether we can make these changes this session remains to be seen.”
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