Read the article in the Houston Chronicle here.

Notice how much column space is devoted to toll proponents versus those of us against Perry’s toll plans. The reason for the article is our rally and the building of a political movement that crosses party lines and draws the attention of gubernatorial candidates. This is an issue that could well shape the outcome of the next gubernatorial election, and yet they allow Perry’s henchmen more space for their unanswered “claims” than we get to dispel them!

The article confirms what we’ve been saying about the tolling of 281 up into Comal County! Regardless of the promise from TxDOT IN WRITING to the Comal Judge that TxDOT wouldn’t toll 281, here’s what the article affirms: “The initial plan calls for tolled lanes on U.S. Highway 281 for the few miles just north of Loop 1604, but later the lanes would be extended into Comal County and north to the Blanco County line.”

To Ms. Brechtel, we’re not interested in voting on and approving every highway project, we are asking to vote on any toll roads (whether traditional or Perry’s shifting of existing freeways to tollways) that will increase our taxes and potentially be given to a private conglomerate to control in order to gouge Texans!

Toll-road foes crank up intensity in San Antonio
Politicians join opposition groups in denouncing plan for pay highways
By JOHN W. GONZALEZ
Houston Chronicle San Antonio Bureau
Jan. 27, 2006

SAN ANTONIO – Preliminary construction of the city’s first tollway was abruptly halted earlier this month for an environmental impact reassessment, but the debate about clogged highways hasn’t slowed a bit.

Anti-tollway rhetoric turned caustic at a recent roadside rally where politicians joined 200 residents in denouncing state plans to build tolled lanes amid the city’s clogged far-northside freeways.

Comptroller and independent gubernatorial candidate Carole Keeton Strayhorn said that if she’s elected, the Texas Department of Transportation “will not do whatever the hell they want to do.” “We’re not going to roll over and have them railroad a tollroad down our throats,” added Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Adkisson.

Supporters point out need
While demanding relief for traffic congestion, tollway foes assailed the five-year-old proposal’s necessity and expense. The first 3.5 miles of the project will cost $83 million to build, and motorists will pay an estimated 15 cents a mile to drive on it. “A couple of overpasses would certainly resolve a great majority of the traffic jam that’s been created out here,” said auto dealer Ernesto Ancira, who made one of his dealerships available for the anti-tollway rally. He opposes addition of tolled lanes to freeways.

Proponents say new lanes — free and tolled — are badly needed on several local arteries, and perennially inadequate government funding for highway projects makes tolled lanes a crucial part of the long-term solution to road snarls.

Upward trends in population growth and home and business construction in northern Bexar County are expected to continue, officials said.

Yet, the state’s proposed solution will have to wait. The reassessment is expected to take eight months, and even without new snags, completion of the first tolled lanes isn’t expected until late 2007.

The initial plan calls for tolled lanes on U.S. Highway 281 for the few miles just north of Loop 1604, but later the lanes would be extended into Comal County and north to the Blanco County line. Parts of Loop 1604 and Interstate 35 also are targeted for tolled lanes.

Six weeks into their work, crews stopped clearing trees from right-of-way along U.S. Highway 281 North on Jan. 12 after the Federal Highway Administration demanded a new environmental survey. Impact studies done in 1984, 2000, 2004 and last year were no longer adequate, officials said.

That move nullified a citizens lawsuit demanding a halt to the project. Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas had joined an anti-tollway group, People for Efficient Transportation, in pressing the suit, which was dismissed Jan. 17.
“When you have these two groups coming together, it just shows the depth and the strength of our cause,” said Texas Toll Party regional director Terri Hall.

“It’s a nonpartisan issue. It’s about highway interests hijacking our freeways and turning them into tollways. It’s an outrage and that’s why the public is galvanized on this,” she said.

A vote for Houston

Houstonians, who use 83 miles of tolled highways operated by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, “got to vote on their tollways. That’s a big difference,” Hall said.

Both sides are honing their strategies during the hiatus. Some toll opponents are calling for a “regime change” in Austin, targeting Gov. Rick Perry and other elected and appointed officials who advocate this and other tollways.

Proponents, meanwhile, hope to convince motorists that the proposed tolled lanes are justified and well planned and are a sure-fire way to hasten — perhaps by decades — funding of other inevitable upgrades.

“The growth is there. The demand is there. The need is now and the state is going to address that in one fashion or another,” said Terry Brechtel, director of the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority, a new entity formed by Bexar County to work with the state on innovative transportation funding.

The authority’s five-year strategic plan calls for a “starter system” of 22 miles of tolled lanes on U.S. Highway 281 North and Loop 1604, with a long-term goal of 50 miles. Wherever tolled lanes are built, free lanes would remain and in some areas will be increased, the plan states.

No tollbooths would be needed because officials are contemplating an electronic pass-card system. And while a Texas contractor has partnered with a Spanish firm in bidding to construct and operate Texas tollways, the local authority insists it will oversee tolled lanes. But getting started on them is essential, Brechtel added.

Though many residents resist tolls, “the state is pretty serious about tolled lanes plugging a gap that we have in our funding of transportation,” Brechtel said. Besides, motorists will “still have the choice of the non-tolled system versus the tolled lanes,” she said.

Responding to residents’ complaints that they never voted on a toll proposal, Brechtel pondered: “Can you imagine what the state’s transportation system would be like if we voted on every highway?”

Instead, residents are invited to another round of public hearings — the first were in 2001 — likely to begin in mid-March.

TxDOT area engineer Frank Holzmann said the state started the first segment because it could be a few years before the state awards bids for larger tollway projects.

“It’ll probably be late 2007, early 2008 before the CDA would go through, so we wanted to try to get this infrastructure in before that time,” Holzmann said.

Brechtel said the project delay gives proponents time to acquaint the public with the role tollways could have in solving the region’s “transportation challenge.”

Read Sal Costello’s, Texas Toll Party Founder, timely and well-stated Letter to the Editor as a response:

Dear Houston Chron Editor,

RE: Toll-road foes crank up intensity in San Antonio (1/28/06)

I enjoyed your article, but it missed one important element. The new tolls that shift our freeways to tollways are not like any other toll road that we’ve seen in this country.

Traditional toll roads have been brand new roads utilized as a means of raising money to pay for them. With traditional toll roads, investors pay to build it only after viability studies warrant the investment, and the toll revenue pays for the road. The public gets the important choice between driving the toll road or the public expressway.

In contrast, ‘Freeway Tolls’ permanently take the option of a free expressway away from us. Freeway tolls privatize and toll our public highways, are created using our tax dollars, and they come without viability studies. These tax booths will never be removed. The revenue is a slush fund that is NOT tied to the toll road people are driving on.

The Comptroller found that the new Regional Mobility Authorities (freeway tolling authorities) are unaccountable bureaucracies that set the toll rate for the roads we’ve already paid for. A double tax. The unelected board members of the first freeway tolling authority in Texas were found to give NO BID contracts to themselves and their friends: http://www.window.state.tx.us/specialrpt/ctrma05/

People for Efficient Transportation is not an anti-toll group, we are FOR traditional toll roads. But, we are AGAINST Gov. Perry’s freeway tolls that convert our public highways into tax collecting machines.

Sincerely,
Sal Costello
Founder of People for Efficient Transportation (TexasTollParty.com)
Austin, TX

Feel free to submit a clarification of your own to the Houston Chronicle.

Here are some very well stated comments to the Transportation Commission from a fellow supporter in Waller County. I couldn’t have said it better, Alice!…

I don’t understand how TxDOT can relinquish its task of right of way acquisitions for building public roads to multinational financial conglomerations whose primary interests and talents are in making and moving money. These conglomerations rival governments in their size and influence and some have argued they ARE the quasi-governments of our future. Where is the protection for the small Texas land owner, who through no fault of his own, happens to stand in the way of these devouring giants bulldozing their way through our precious countryside? What chance will any Texan have in getting fair justice when what is left of our government is nothing more than a proxy puppet for these financial institutions? Thomas Jefferson said “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But when and where did the people of Texas consent to be governed by money making corporations?

Decades from now historians will record our age as one of the most politically corrupt periods in American History rivaling the Gilded Age of the 19th century. Enron, Abramoff and the Trans Texas Corridor. Big Money, Big Manipulations, Big Mistakes.

Alice Sorsby McGuffie
Waller, Tx. 77484
Jan. 26, 2006
Presentation to Texas Transportation Commission

Talk about a faux pas…

We sent out an email asking our supporters to call Senator Hutchison’s office to question why she would endorse a “toller” given the following comment by the Senator: “I’m opposed to slapping a toll on a highway that’s already built”–Texas Monthly, November 2004

Today candidate for re-election as State Representative, Carter Casteel, claimed Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison endorsed her in a hotly contested race for the 73rd District which spans Bandera, Comal, Gillespie, and Kendall counties. That’s Boerne, Bulverde, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, Bandera and other Hill Country towns. Nathan Macias is her opponent and is committed IN WRITING to stop the tolling of existing FREEways. You can contact Senator Hutchison’s office below:

San Antonio office: 210-340-2885
Austin office: 512-916-5834
Washington DC 202-224-5922

Here’s a statement made by the Senator which is on our blog. Note the Senator’s opposition to freeway tolls yet Casteel, who voted to toll existing highways (voted for HB 2702 which proliferated tolls and actually made it legal to toll existing highways), claims Hutchison endorses her!

Excerpt from interview with Kay Bailey Hutchinson:

“Kay Bailey Hutchison”
by Evan Smith
Texas Monthly, November 2004

“I think he’s right to prioritize transportation. We have a highway crisis. But we’ve come way too late to the importance of rail in our transit system and our urban areas. I think that rail can be a viable alternative to clogging our highways. Eighty percent of the NAFTA cars and trucks in the U.S. come through Texas. We’re helping at the federal level with the NAFTA corridors, I-69 and I-35. I put a separate fund in the highway bill for border corridors, because this is such a huge issue for us. But I don’t want a cement Texas. We cannot just pave over our urban areas. And I don’t want a toll Texas. I’m opposed to slapping a toll on a highway that’s already built. Now, if people vote a bond issue for a toll road, fine. But to build a highway with taxpayer dollars and then go in and put a toll on it and clog up the rest of the arteries in the city—it’s not right.”

Read Casteel’s press release below…

————————–

Hutchison Endorses Casteel Re-Election

U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison formally endorsed State Representative Carter Casteel (R-New Braunfels) for re-election to the Texas House today. “Carter Casteel is a conservative leader in the Texas House,” Hutchison said. “I salute Carter’s outspoken determination and heartily support her re-election this year.”

Hutchison, herself a former state representative, applauded Casteel’s public service. “Representing the Hill Country with conviction and vigor, Carter’s record demonstrates a commitment to the values that make Texas great,” Hutchison added.

“Senator Hutchison and I have worked together for the Hill Country and Texas. Her leadership in both the Republican Party and the U.S. Senate is invaluable to our state,” Casteel said. “I am honored to have her endorsement and support.”

Casteel has been previously endorsed by House Speaker Tom Craddick (R-Midland), Texas Agriculture Commissioner Susan Combs and the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund.

Key Campaign Dates

February 6 Voter registration deadline
February 21 Early voting begins
March 7 Primary election

Political advertising paid for by the
Carter Casteel Campaign
Post Office Box 312404
New Braunfels, Texas 78131
830-627-8820 Phone
830-627-8895 Fax

——————————-

Read just two of the emails from our supporters who called Senator Hutchison’s office…

I just got off the phone with Senator Hutchinson’s office. They emphatically deny that she is in support of Carter Casteel and reiterated that she is opposed to toll roads. The person with whom I spoke with in her office made me aware that as soon as your email was out, their office has been flooded with calls concerning such. THANKS for all your hard work!

–Ray

Senator Hutchinson’s staff (San Antonio office) denies that Senator Hutchinson has endorsed Carter Casteel. They state that they (San Antonio office) have gotten no confirmation from the Senator regarding the alleged endorsement by Senator Hutchinson. I just spoke with them by phone and that is what they are saying.

–Tim

It doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us following Perry’s “innovative financing” to tolling Texas highways that local officials in Dallas are being railroaded by TxDOT in a public-private partnership takeover of the 121 toll project. Read it in the Dallas Morning News.

Here’s some of the highlights. Note how the local officials actually use some of our terms, like double taxation and taxation without representation!…

According to Frisco officials, if the state ends up in control of the project, annual tolls are expected to be more than double the amount that would be charged under a plan proposed by Collin County, Frisco, Allen, McKinney and Plano….

“I don’t know if that gets your blood boiling, but it does mine,” he said. “They shouldn’t be taking money out of your pocket to help fund roadways somewhere else.”

Sound familiar? Where are our local county commissioners and State legislators on this key issue that effects the future of our city? Why aren’t they defending us from this highway robbery? With only two notable exceptions, Commission Tommy Adkisson and Commissioner Lyle Larson, our local elected officials are silent and think they can avoid the issue and just cruise to re-election! Contact these tollers and our local elected officials to tell them to say “No” to Governor Perry and his Transportation Commission’s attempts to overtax the citizens of Texas to line the pockets of private interests or they’ll be escorted from office!
See who voted to toll you here!
Find out who your representatives are here.
Find your county commissioner here (commissioners appoint our local tolling authority board).

WOAI reports.
Also, read about the commissioners’ letter on Pat Driscoll’s blog.

Thank you, Commissioners!

See it here!

It was the same ol’ song and dance from TxDOT. The “you don’t have to take the toll road” line doesn’t hold water when the non-toll lanes will be frontage road with slower stop and go traffic that a foreign company can manipulate to maximize their profits! They’re taking a FREEway and replacing it with a surface street and expect us to call that “improvements!”

TxDOT admitted:

– They are, in fact, tolling the existing highway we drive on today
– The tolls won’t come off the roads…EVER!
– Both the original plan ($48 million) AND now the toll project ($83 million) are 100% paid for with gas tax money, but we won’t be able to drive on it without paying a toll, too!
– Admitted toll taxes on 281 drivers will fund more toll lanes on 1604 and other highways 281 users may not use
– That HNTB (the company the tolling authority just hired for $6.5 million to engineer toll roads on I-35, Wurzbach, and Bandera Rd) is going to conduct their new environmental assessment…can you say, conflict of interest? It never ends with these people!

A supporter videotaped the whole thing, so we’ll try to get soundbites up so you can see for yourself!

Senator Jeff Wentworth’s Push Poll

Those in Senator Wentworth’s 25th District should have received his “survey” by mail. If so, note his leading questions on transportation:
1) In order to reduce congestion on our public highways, do you favor an increase in gasoline taxes of up to 50 cents per gallon to fund new highway construction?
2) In order to reduce congestion on our public highways, do you favor the construction of new highways to be paid for by tolls?

Reply to his “survey” with the facts in the comments section or in the form of a letter. If you’re a constituent and haven’t received one, contact his office and ask for one: (210) 826-7800 or email.

Many of you have already emailed us about this. Certainly his questions aren’t questions, rather they try to lead the reader to a foregone conclusion. Hence, a push poll. First of all, his office confirmed that he has no basis in fact as to the 50 cent a gallon gas tax hike. Apparently, TxDOT told him it would be a $1.00 a gallon gas tax hike! He thought that sounded too high so he put 50 cents instead. So much for a rationale, data, or facts driving these figures!

TxDOT nor Senator Wentworth can substantiate EITHER of these figures. They’re scare tactics. Even with a 50 cent per gallon gas tax hike, do the math. The average San Antonian buys about 1500 gallons of gas a year. The state gas tax is 20 cents per gallon. That would equal $300 a year. A 50 cent hike would equal $750 a year. TxDOT claims they need 5 times more money for highways ($1.00 a gallon MORE)! But let’s indulge them and assume these outrageous figures are true…that’s still less money than a lifetime of toll tax. TxDOT’s own online survey conducted by Survey Cafe quoted 29 cents a mile for a 20 mile commute on 1604. That’s $5.90 ONE WAY to work and over $3,000 a year in toll taxes.

Hmmm, give the voter this choice…stick with the gas tax system that can’t be raised without agreement of the entire legislature and signed into law by the Governor, or hand the authority to enact a whole new driving tax over to an unelected tolling board allowing them to broker secret 50 year sweetheart deals with private foreign companies to raise toll rates as high as they wish and I think the answer is obvious!

Here’s the zinger. Check out Wentworth’s own words from his own press release back in 2003…

“I am opposed to converting existing public highways into toll roads. Taxpayers have already paid for those highways and should not have to pay to drive on roads they have already paid for.”
— Senator Jeff Wentworth (November 7, 2003)

Read the Senator’s press release.

Let Senator Wentworth know how you feel about his sudden change of heart about converting, US 281 and 1604, existing highways in HIS district into tollways: (210) 826-7800 or email. I thought it was a double tax, Senator? I thought you were against this? Clearly his questionnaire demonstrates he’s pushing tolls and using false and unsubstantiated information to do it!

NEWS RELEASE
Contact: David Van Os
david@vanosfortexasag.com
(210) 225-1955

SAN ANTONIO, Texas, January 24, 2006 – David Van Os, unopposed in the Democratic Primary as candidate for Texas Attorney General, challenged Attorney General Greg Abbott to perform his Constitutional duty to investigate state plans for private corporations to collect tolls on public highways.

In a letter to Abbott dated Jan. 20, 2006, Van Os noted, “…Article 4 Section 22 of the Texas Constitution requires the Attorney General to ‘take such action as may be proper and necessary to prevent any private corporation from … demanding or collecting any species of taxes, tolls, freight or wharfage not authorized by law.’”

Van Os’ letter asserts: “Many Texas citizens are concerned about the anticipated usage of public authority to enable private corporations to collect toll fees for huge toll-road projects that are being planned and forecast by the Texas Department of Transportation, such as the ‘Trans Texas Corridor,’ and tolling projects in northern Bexar County involving Highway 281, Loop 1604, Interstate 10 and/or Interstate 35.”

Cintra-Zachary, a private business venture of San Antonio contractor H.B. Zachary and a Spanish company, is slated to operate the Trans Texas Corridor and Highway 281 toll-ways and collect the tolls. Since the Attorney General is Constitutionally obligated to prevent a private corporation from collecting a legally unauthorized toll, Van Os states that Abbott must investigate the planned tolling arrangements to determine their legality under all applicable laws. Since TX-DOT was recently cited for failing to conduct environmental impact studies mandated by environmental protection laws for its Highway 281 plans, there is clearly good reason for Abbott to investigate conformity with all laws before plans proceed further. As another example, Van Os points out to Abbott that, “In the case of Highway 281 in northern Bexar County, there is a specific and serious concern as to whether all legal requirements would be met for the conversion of existing freeways to toll highways.”

Van Os wants to know if Abbott has “fulfilled your Constitutional duty to investigate these planned TX-DOT projects to determine whether the planned or anticipated toll operations will be in compliance with all applicable laws, and if so, what are the results of your investigations? If you have not done so, do you intend to conduct investigations, and will you share the results with the public?” Van Os’s letter concludes by challenging Abbott: “As required of you by the Texas Constitution, I call upon you to take all necessary and proper actions to safeguard the people from the potential dangers to the public well-being posed by private toll collectors.”

As he has stated many times, David Van Os strongly believes that “Public authority should never be exploited for private gain.”