Dallas Toll Road Bait and Switch Politics

This is one of the Toll Roads exempted from HB1892.


Angela Hunt is a Dallas City Council member and wrote this article that was published today.

If you entered a voting booth on May 2, 1998, you saw the following on the ballot:

"Proposition 11: The issuance of $246,000,000 general obligation Trinity River Corridor Project bonds, the project to include floodways, levees, waterways, open space, recreational facilities, the Trinity Parkway and related street improvements, and other related, necessary, and incidental improvements to the Trinity River Corridor."

Two key words are conspicuously absent: "toll" and "road."

Almost a decade ago, the city sold voters a vision of parks, lakes and sailboats. After the election, in a classic bait and switch, City Hall quickly dispensed with any pretense that this was anything other than a roads project. Originally envisioned as a low-speed parkway that would provide direct access to the park, the "Trinity Parkway" quickly devolved into a high-speed toll road completely disconnected from the park.

Other changes followed:

•In 1998, the estimated cost of the Trinity Parkway was $394 million. Today, the toll road is $600 million over budget and will cost more than $1 billion. City officials are unable to provide a final cost estimate.

•In 1998, the city claimed that flood control was a critical component of the Trinity River Corridor Project. This February, we learned that the Tollway Authority intends to seek a waiver from the federal government to build the road using pre-Katrina safety standards, instead of new, more stringent standards being developed in response to the disaster in New Orleans.

•Last November, the city moved the toll road even farther into the park in response to safety concerns by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who feared that the road would weaken our levees. By the city's own calculation – and despite furious backpedaling and word-parsing – this will eliminate one-third of the downtown Trinity parkland and reduce the size of our lakes.

•The Corps also confirmed that the toll road will flood and that they must reserve the right to rip out sections of the road to repair our levees.

•There are no guarantees that this toll road will not be sold to a foreign company. In fact, last week, the state Senate transportation committee exempted the road from a proposed two-year ban on long-term toll road leases with private companies.

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