Link to article here.

It’s not only an inappropriate and wasteful use of our gas tax dollars, but it’s ILLEGAL for a PUBLIC agency to take a policy position and use the public’s tax money to sell them something with a under-handed PR campaign. The State Auditor already found TxDOT “cooked the books” Enron-style on the Trans Texas Corridor mismarking funds as “engineering” when in fact, they spent it on PR. This is “an agency run amok”, to quote Chisum himself, so why isn’t the Attorney General prosecuting this blatant violation of the law? Let’s back up the tough talk with ACTION to protect the taxpayers! When will the citizens see justice?

Then, TxDOT and House Transportation Chair Mike Krusee try to excuse using taxpayer money to lobby for the most expensive road tax by implying the public just doesn’t “get” their message. No. we’ve got it loud and clear. What about “NO!” do they NOT understand??? TxDOT has arrogantly disregarded ANY public input, dismissed and ridiculed more affordable alternatives put forward by anyone other than themselves, and is purposely jacking up roads all over San Antonio all at once and snarling the whole City in congestion for the express purpose of getting us to cry “Uncle” and beg for tolls. Now they want to use OUR MONEY for “outreach?” What a JOKE! How ’bout you use our gas taxes to build FREEways, stop monkeying around with people lives to push the most expensive option to enrich your own pensions, and get on with it?

Don’t like toll roads? TxDOT is talking to you
By Peggy Fikac
Express-News Austin Bureau
08/20/2007

AUSTIN — The Texas Department of Transportation, which complains about chronic underfunding, has launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign that promotes the divisive Trans-Texas Corridor plan and toll roads.The campaign is anticipated to cost $7 million to $9 million, according to a memorandum titled “Keep Texas Moving: Tolling and Trans-Texas Corridor Outreach” sent to transportation officials by Coby Chase, director of the agency’s government and public affairs division.

Such use of state highway fund dollars is drawing concern and questions from some. Others, including the department, say it’s an important effort to educate and engage Texans.

Put Rep. Warren Chisum, chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee, in the first category.

“I wonder what for? So people wouldn’t hate ’em so bad?” he said of the campaign. “It’s a waste of money, and they have no business out there trying to get public opinion to be in their favor.”

The money would be better spent fixing roads, Chisum, R-Pampa, added: “It would probably take care of three or four potholes.”

But Rep. Mike Krusee, House Transportation Committee chairman, said the campaign addresses lawmakers’ concerns by explaining new financing methods.

“The Legislature has been beating TxDOT over the head for two years, telling them they need to explain what the Trans-Texas Corridor is and why it is necessary to the public. They’ve been telling TxDOT they are moving too fast — they are moving before the public and the Legislature has the chance to understand what they are doing and why,” said Krusee, R-Round Rock. “I think it is the Legislature that has pressured TxDOT to do this sort of program.”

If the outreach is effective, Krusee said, it could save money in the long run.

“Texas is losing money for roads by the hundreds of millions of dollars every year simply due to delay, because the Legislature and the public doesn’t understand the need to move to a new finance method. And so an expenditure of a few million dollars could literally save hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” Krusee said.

The agency’s budget is more than $7 billion for fiscal year 2007 and more than $8 billion for fiscal year 2008.

The Trans-Texas Corridor — an ambitious transportation network — and toll roads have been championed by Gov. Rick Perry and others as necessary in the face of congestion and of gas tax revenues that can’t keep up with huge transportation needs.

But the initiative has drawn widespread criticism over the potential route and the state partnering with private companies to run toll roads. Lawmakers this year sought to rein in new private toll projects.

The new campaign, as outlined in the memorandum obtained by the San Antonio Express-News, started June 1 with television, radio, print, billboard and Internet advertising meant to push people to the Keep Texas Moving Web site ( www.keeptexasmoving.com).

That site compares the Trans-Texas Corridor to “Eisenhower’s Interstate System.” Its toll road section lists a slew of benefits including “A Choice to Go Faster” and “More Roads, More Choices, More Time.”

The campaign also will include direct mail pieces on Trans-Texas Corridor segments known as TTC-35 (parallel to Interstate 35) and TTC-69 (from East Texas to Mexico); training for agency representatives to appear on talk radio; and ads, events and guest editorials surrounding hearings on TTC-69.

Sal Costello, who founded the TexasTollParty.com group because of anger over the way tollways were being planned under Perry, said, “I just don’t think an agency that has been ignoring the public and ignoring our representatives for years should be able to take our tax dollars intended for freeways and spend one dime on lobbying and selling their unaccountable schemes.”

TxDOT spokesman Chris Lippincott said the aim of the campaign is to address concerns that the agency hasn’t done enough outreach and the public hasn’t had enough input. State law allows the agency to spend money on marketing toll roads, he said.

“The clearest and most often repeated criticism of the department during the legislative session was that we needed to do a better job of engaging the public. We heard that message loud and clear, and we’re acting on it,” he said. “You’re going to see us expanding the way we talk with people instead of at people. We think that’s really important.”

Craig McDonald of Texans for Public Justice, which tracks money in politics, said the campaign appears to go beyond providing information, which he said isn’t right although he knows of no law to prevent it.

“The tone of their public relations campaign seems to be to sell Texans on a very unpopular transportation scheme,” he said. “That is, they are using our money to make us happy about spending money for every mile we drive through tolls.”

Link to article here.

Actually, the new market-based tolls unleashed in SB 792 will be much higher than 12-15 cents a miles. We’re seeing toll rates more like 40 cents a mile, up to $1.50 a mile in Austin right now. Tolls are an inefficient, DOUBLE TAX, too easily raised on the whim of a bureaucrat whereas it takes an ACT OF CONGRESS to raise the gas tax. Let’s put on a lid on this unaccountable, runaway tax, STOP the diversions of gas tax away from transportation, and get some fiscal sanity back into transportation, then we can look at the possibility of putting an adequate gas tax in place. Toll proponents need to take a hike…or as this columnists says, hit the road!

Toll enthusiasts can hit the road
By Paul Munshine
New Jersey Star-Ledger
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Last weekend I was vacation ing in the Poconos and I got talking to some of the locals. They were pretty steamed. It seems that Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is pushing a scheme to im pose tolls on the Pennsylvania sec tion of Interstate 80.

I’m pretty steamed, too. If Pennsylvanians want to charge tolls on the roads they built with their own money, such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike, that’s none of my business.

But I-80 was built with my tax dollars under a program begun by the esteemed Republican president Dwight Eisenhower. Now this Democrat wants to use the road as a cash cow. He isn’t even pretending, as politicians usually do, that the purpose of the tolls is to fix up the road. Instead “Fast Eddie,” as Pennsylvanians call their governor, wants to make a quick buck off the road to fund mass transit in Philly and Pittsburgh.

You can imagine how well that’s going over in rural northern Pennsylvania. Several members of Congress are fighting the plan in the House. Rep. Phil English, a Republican, succeeded in getting a rider inserted in an appropriations bill that would ban the tolls. But the bill needs to win Senate approval and be signed by President Bush.

Here’s where the plot thickens. You would expect Bush as a Republican to oppose the efforts of Rendell and our own Democratic governor, Jon Corzine, to balance their budgets through that form of fiscal trickery we have come to know as “asset monetization.” Like Rendell, Corzine also flirted with the idea of putting tolls on our sec tions of I-80 and I-78, but Jersey drivers made it plain to Corzine that this was political suicide. So Corzine has to content himself for now with making a buck off our existing toll roads.

But you can’t blame Democrats for this fiasco. In fact, it was the prior President Bush who pushed the change in federal law that permits imposing tolls on federally funded freeways. And the current President Bush’s transportation secretary, Mary Peters, has been turning up in Pennsylvania to offer support for putting tolls on I-80.

And guess where else Peters has been hanging out? You got it: Texas. There she’s been buddying up to Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican and a Bush protégé. Peters and Perry have been plotting with a Spanish firm by the name of Cintra to build a massive 4,000-mile network of toll roads called the Trans-Texas Corridor. One problem: Texas already has an excellent network of freeways. So how do the pols plan to get Texans to use the toll roads instead?

Texas Transportation Secretary Ric Williamson has provided the answer. In a 2004 Houston Chronicle article, he was quoted as telling Texans “in your lifetime most exist ing roads will have tolls.” The I-80 effort in Pennsylvania, in other words, looks like just the first step in a national effort to convert the interstate system into a network of toll roads. Private corporations such as Cintra are ready to hand over billions of dollars up front against future toll collections.

The benefits for politicians are immense.

It’s a disaster for drivers, however.

If you think those Pennsylvanians are peeved, give Dave Stall a call. He and his wife have founded a citizens’ group to fight the Texas toll plans. When I got him on the phone, Stall told me that Texas plans to charge 15 cents a mile on toll roads. If you’re driving a car that gets 27 miles per gallon, that’s equivalent to approximately a $4-a-gallon gas tax.

“It’s really interesting that there is a complete aversion to any increase in the gasoline tax by the governor, yet there is this rush to privatize and toll,” he said.

Indeed it is. And it’s really interesting that on the national level Bush claims to be firmly opposed to a mere 5-cent-a-gallon increase in the federal gas tax while his transportation secretary supports tolls. Let’s say I want to drive from the Delaware Water Gap to the Ohio state line on I-80. That 5-cent gas-tax increase would cost me perhaps 50 cents. The projected toll, meanwhile, would be about $20.

That $19.50 difference explains why politicians of both parties are so hot on tolls. Every cent of a gas tax increase would go to transportation. But tolls provide a vast pool of money for lobbyists, lawyers, patronage jobs — you name it.

By the way, if you’re confused by the term “asset monetization,” Stall has a definition that any Jersey driver will understand.

“It’s Tony Soprano,” Stall said. “He gives you an envelope on top of the table, and then he hands you another envelope under the table.”

In 50 short years, we’ve gone from a Dwight Eisenhower approach to funding freeways to a Tony Soprano approach. Call me nostalgic, but I like Ike.