Jeff Wentworth touts himself as a strong advocate for open government and yet DOES NOTHING to force the Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to open the records on secret toll road agreements. Having just concluded Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know Texans are demanding just that! Texans have a RIGHT TO KNOW what taxpayers are being asked to pay for. The courts agreed and yet TxDOT and Cintra continue to keep the records secret while they tie up the case in court and continue building the toll road (Read article in Houston Chronicle here.).

Wentworth asked the Transportation Commission to consider the original plan for 281 improvements rather than push tolls, but his law firm represents road builders and the BIG MONEY special interests who stand to profit handsomely off these toll roads. So perhaps the Transportation Commission realizes his letters and gestures are just that, gestures with NO REAL TEETH. Therefore, on they march to convert exitsing highways into tollways without so much as a REAL fight from our legislators! Toothless overtures won’t cut it. Demand toll-free solutions and build consensus (not throw in the towel at a veto threat) to FIX the transportation funding mechanisms (like stopping the diversion of gas taxes to fund things other than highways!). Stop the blame game and get us moving again!

Read how Wentworth’s law firm promises to use its government affairs professionals to “secure competitive advantages for their clients”: “We combine unmatched government affairs capabilities with the substantive and legal background necessary both to discern how decisions made in Washington, DC, and in state capitals will affect clients’ interests, and to develop and implement strategies to defend and further those interests and secure competitive advantages for our clients.”

CONTACT WENTWORTH at (512) 463-0125, (210) 826-7800 or jeff.wentworth@senate.state.tx.us and ask for:
1) a true side by side comparison of highway costs using gas taxes versus tolls (as was done by the Austin MPO who found it was only 2 cent gas tax increase, NOT 50 cents to $1.00 as the Transportation Commission claims with no PROOF)
2) a public vote on all toll projects (whether they’re in progress or not)
3) to put up REAL opposition to tolling 281 and insist the ORIGINAL plan that’s ALREADY FUNDED be installed NOW!

Sunshine Week sheds light on the importance of open government
by Jeff Wentworth
State Senator, District 25
Published: 03-20-06

Texas news media recently observed the second anniversary of “Sunshine Week: Your Right to Know.” While the official weeklong observance has concluded, I believe that the spirit of Sunshine Week should continue throughout the year.

As a strong advocate for open government, I am reminding Texans that the Texas Public Information Act affirms each person’s entitlement to complete information about the affairs of government and the official acts of public officials and employees.

Unfortunately, public officials often fail to provide Texans with the information that they request and are entitled to have. These officials fail to provide the requested information in spite of landmark freedom-of-information legislation that I authored and the Texas Legislature passed in 1999.

Requests for open records rulings made to the Attorney General’s Open Records Division have increased nearly 50 percent over the last two years. In 2005, the division received more than 12,000 open records requests. More than 10,000 calls per year are made to the Open Government Hotline’s toll-free number, (877) OPEN TEX (673-6839).

While it is the Attorney General’s job to determine what information must be disclosed and what may legally be kept confidential, many of the requests would not be necessary if public officials knew the law. While some public officials may deliberately stonewall those requesting information, the vast majority may request an Attorney General’s ruling because they simply aren’t sure what is public information and what is not.

To ensure that state government is both open and responsive, I filed Senate Bill 286 during last year’s regular legislative session at the request of Attorney General Abbott. The Legislature passed the bill, and it was signed by the Governor. Senate Bill 286, which became effective January 1 of this year, requires that the elected and appointed public officials in the 2,600 governmental entities in Texas take an open government training and education course through the Attorney General’s Office.

I am happy to report that 4,600 public officials have completed the one-hour Public Information Act course, and 5,000 have completed the Open Meetings Act course. The courses, which are available both online and on video, are being taken by city and county officials, school board members, and state agency and commission employees.

One Texas city sponsored an open meeting where all city board members watched the two-hour video. After the video, a panel answered questions. My Jurisprudence Committee director and general counsel, M. L. Calcote, was a panel member.

Information about filing open records requests and filing open records complaints is available on the Attorney General’s Web site: www.oag.state.tx.us.

I am happy to see that public officials are responding in such a positive manner. To ensure that state government is open to all Texans, I encourage every public official to follow the law and take the required courses so they may better understand their
responsibilities and respond appropriately and in a timely manner.

Read it in the Express-News. Jonathan Epstein and Tom Bergo both address the toll road debacle in their letters…WAY TO GO! The Express-News has been flooded with letters like these, and yet they only print drips and drops! Notice how Tim Tuggey, HUGE pro-toll proponent, gets all kinds of ink to tout Via without questioning his conflicts of interest. His law firm represents the highway lobby and he sits on the Via Board and yet he advocates gobbling up all available transportation dollars for highways without seeing to it public transit is properly funded.

LETTERS TO EDITOR
Put $200 million toward things we really need

It is amazing how quickly County Judge Nelson Wolff and his cronies can find $200 million to throw at a Major League Baseball team and I am driving on major arteries filled with potholes and trash.

Extending the hotel and rental car tax seems to be the answer to funding everyone’s boondoggle. The tax funded the SBC/AT&T Center, which, of course, had nothing to do with tourism. Now that it will soon expire, either rescind it or point it toward something that tourists actually use, such as our roadways and other infrastructure.

The tax itself is one of the highest in the country, and it is time to make good use of the funds on things the city actually needs and not pie-in-the-sky projects.

Jonathan Epstein

Toll roads stifle growth, slow everyone down

The Editorial Board needs to reconsider its stance on toll roads and their value to a community. I can think of no better way to stifle growth and slow down the efficient movement of people and goods. Having lived in Chicago for 10 years and seeing the tollways there in and around Illinois, I have concluded toll roads are no better than free roads during any period of heavy traffic — just more expensive.

The article “The logical route” by Rebeca Chapa seems to rely heavily on quotes by those interested in seeing the tollways built and not on those who oppose them. This myopic view pays a disservice to readers and exposes the paper to the criticism that it and its editorial staff are influenced by those who will profit financially from the toll construction and not by the people of the community who have already paid for the roads and will have to do so again.

It is not so much the fact that the construction will merely have to build frontage roads and call this “equivalent.” The fact is that the right of way that they will be assuming and charging me for was already paid for with my tax dollars once.

This pattern of missed opportunities for leadership seems to be rampant throughout the Texas government. Saying every future road should be a toll road allows Gov. Rick Perry to sidestep one of the hard issues, just as he and the Legislature have sidestepped other hard issues. Another example is school funding and property tax reform. By doing nothing, the politicos have had a solution forced on them by the courts so they can individually claim they are not responsible for the outcome.

Any publication worth its salt would investigate all sides of an issue and report both sides fairly — which the Editorial Board has plainly not done. The board has obviously missed the fact that improvements for “fixing” the problem with U.S. 281 were already funded and ready to go when the tollway solution was mandated on the unsuspecting public. My suspicion is that inflation will cause these funds to be insufficient when the toll solution is finally rejected and that my tax dollars will have to make up this shortfall.

Further, I have a problem with any deal made between the state and a private concern where the contracts are not available for the public to examine — especially when I’m paying for the service the firm will be delivering.

Please take a step back and re-examine this issue from the standpoint of a taxpayer who has already paid for a service once and will have to pay for many times more if the tollway issue is not stopped. It would not be so bad if the tolls were stopped when the road was paid for, but the profit motive of a private company will ensure they will live on forever.

Tom Bergo

Link to article in Waco Tribune here.

Cintra and its partner Macquarie are planning a hostile takeover of our freeways in San Antonio over the LOUD and WIDESPREAD objection of the PEOPLE. Cintra-Macquarie will contorl the Chicago Skyway, the Indiana Toll Road and are poised to purchase control over our publicly owned freeways in San Antonio. We’ve been linking the public infrastructure takeover like this: the Dubai ports firestorm and Perry’s toll road deals are the SAME THING! According to a Rasmussen poll, over 80% of the country is AGAINST foreign management of our public infrastructure (Rasmussen poll here.) and whether Perry’s campaign wants to acknowledge it or not, that’s what he’s doing. We’re continuing to work with fellow concerned citizens all over this state to inform the public about this debacle and to send the Governor packing since he refuses to heed the will of the people and refuses to stop the foreign management of our public infrastructure! (See previous blog on this subject)

Officials not linking ports deal, new tollway
By Mike Anderson
Tribune-Herald staff writer
Sunday, March 19, 2006

Federal officials have been squabbling in recent weeks over a proposal to give operations of some U.S. ports to a Dubai company, but in Texas, state officials don’t appear to share the same concerns about a Spanish company operating portions of the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor.

On Thursday, a state-owned Dubai company announced it was backing out of a deal to manage some terminal operations at six American ports, amid a political firestorm in Congress. President Bush supported the arrangement, but it was opposed by some in Congress who expressed concern about security issues arising from having a foreign company operating U.S. ports.

Meanwhile in Texas, the Spanish company Cintra, joining with San Antonio-based Zachry Construction, has signed a contract with the state to develop portions of the Trans-Texas Corridor between Mexico and Oklahoma.

Gov. Rick Perry proposed the project in 2002 as a means to handle current and future trade traffic and population growth by providing an alternative to the interstate highway system. The project would bring together highways, rail and utility infrastructure in a 1,200-foot-wide tollway. The Texas Department of Transportation is expected to announce a 10-mile-wide environmental impact study area for the corridor in the next few weeks. The corridor will likely pass through McLennan County.

Cintra has proposed investing $6 billion to build a toll road between Dallas and San Antonio by 2010, with an additional $1.2 billion to extend the corridor to Mexico, state officials have said. In return for the investment, Cintra has proposed to negotiate for a 50-year contract to maintain and operate the new highway as a toll road, officials have said.

When Perry proposed the corridor, he promoted it in part as a way to improve the state’s ability to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks or other disasters by creating hazardous material routes outside major cities. He also touted the corridor as providing transportation alternatives which would make it more difficult to paralyze the state’s infrastructure.

On Friday, Perry spokeswoman Rachael Novier said while ensuring Texans’ safety is the governor’s number one priority, she does not see a parallel between the operation of the Trans-Texas Corridor and the concerns expressed over a Dubai company overseeing American ports. Novier pointed out that Cintra will be working with Zachry Construction, which she described as the nation’s largest construction firm.

State transportation department spokeswoman Gabby Garcia said even if Cintra operates the toll road, the state will retain oversight and ownership. She added that while Cintra will be the first at the table to negotiate to build and operate the corridor, that does not mean they are guaranteed to be the builder. She said the competitive process is ongoing.

One person who has been critical of the state’s corridor plan, Waco resident Rick Wegwerth, laughed when ask about a possible comparison between foreign operation of ports and the corridor.

“Isn’t that funny that we give a 50-year monopoly to a Spanish company to put in a highway to nowhere, then at the same time everybody has a huge problem with a foreign company running our ports,” said Wegwerth, an organizer of the McLennan County anti-corridor group DERAIL.

The New York Times news service contributed to this story.

manderson@wacotrib.com

757-5741

Link to article here.

Carlos Guerra: With toll roads, the devils in the details could be astounding
Web Posted: 03/16/2006 12:00 AM CST
San Antonio Express-News

Two decades of white-knuckle drives to Austin on Interstate 35 are proof that highway work isn’t a quick endeavor. But what few realize is that planning started years before construction, and Texas Department of Transportation planners have never stopped altering and tweaking their plans.

It makes sense. Big highway projects can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and permanently change communities.

But other things to consider are that a major highway built to nowhere will, in time, make it somewhere because a highway goes there. Big roads can defy the laws of supply and demand. Planners often warn against trying to “build your way out of congestion” because building a highway might actually increase demand and necessitate even greater expansion.

Phillip Russell, director of TxDOT’s Turnpike Authority Division, is now busily working on details for Texas’ regional toll roads and the Trans Texas Corridor.

With new powers granted by the Legislature, TxDOT’s dependence on fuel taxes to fund road building will decline as reliance on tolls — collected by the state and private-sector concessionaires — increases.

Private-sector money, TxDOT officials say, will accelerate regional projects and fund construction of the Trans Texas Corridor, whose 1,200-foot-wide right of way — with tolled lanes, rails for commuter and cargo trains, and right of way for utilities — will crisscross the state.

But the conceptual map, which depicts the potential quarter-mile-wide routes within 50-mile-wide swaths, has so worried farmers, ranchers, wildlife conservationists, water rights activists and environmentalists that they have coalesced to oppose the project, and toll-roads in general.

“You have to understand that the Trans Texas Corridor will be built as needed and as private-sector funding makes it feasible,” Russell says, adding that, so far, TxDOT has awarded only one TTC contract, a $3.5 million pact with Cintra-Zachry to develop plans for the first leg, which will eventually link Oklahoma and Mexico.

All toll road contracts, Russell emphasizes, will include an option for Texas to buy the road back, a seemingly pointless gesture because if the state can’t afford to build the roads now, how will it afford to buy them back? Russell is also frank about why investors would want into such deals.

“Are they willing to take all this risk out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not,” he says. “Clearly, they want a return and they want to be paid back.”

He also is clear about another little-mentioned element likely to be part of toll road bond issues: Underwriters will probably require limits on options for people who choose not to pay tolls.

“Wall Street wants to know they’ll get paid,” he says of the no-compete clauses, but adds that discussions with potential investors lead him to believe that the bankers will allow Texas to build competitive commuter rail and roads “already on our 25-year plans.”

But with that reassurance — and realizing how inexact planning can be — TxDOT’s planners better have the finest crystal balls available, because such constraints mean that regardless of unforeseen changes, only those toll-free roads already in the plans will be allowed over the next 25 years.

And since toll road bonds won’t mature for 40 years, after year 25 it would be 15 more years before the state could build competing roads for people to take toll-free.

Do we really want this?

To contact Carlos Guerra, call (210) 250-3545 or e-mail cguerra@express-news.net.

Link to article.

The headline is misleading in that it looks like they’re simply “studying” toll lanes. Not so, 1604 toll lanes are already in the toll plans and contract negotiations are near completion. Perhaps yet another ploy to catch the public off-guard and unawares until it’s too late. Otherwise, a very fair and balanced article.Though TxDOT and the RMA keep stating the public financing option is still on the table, TxDOT’s statements here make it clear the private deal is the way they’re going, “Officials said little or no money would come from public funds because of a plan to use private investments to construct the start-up toll network and open the lanes to motorists sooner. That will free up more money from the state to be used for other needed projects.”

The “public funds” they refer to is the $77 million for the improvements on 281, $48 million of which has been funded and programmed since 2004 along with public bond debt. Bexar County Commissioner Lyle Larson has stated TxDOT has not been honest with taxpayers about the amount of gas tax funds being used to build these tollways (Read his statements in WOAI story here.). TxDOT gives the impression it’s private money fronting this, but a heap of tax dollars and bond debt goes into the equation as well. Over $500 million of YOUR gas taxes have alreayd been allocated for toll projects thanks to the MPO (See what MPO and other toll terms mean here.)!

Officials studying Loop 1604 toll concept
Web Posted: 03/15/2006 12:01 AM CST
Lety Laurel
Express-News Staff Writer

People driving along Loop 1604’s northern arc someday may have a choice between congestion and stopping for traffic lights or paying a toll to avoid them — whether they want the option or not.

Texas Department of Transportation officials are investigating whether placing toll lanes along Loop 1604 between Highway 151 and Interstate 10 East is a feasible and economically viable solution to the traffic woes that exist along the route.

The estimated price tag is $1.4 billion for the entire 47-mile project, which also includes a portion of U.S. 281 from Loop 1604 to Comal County. Officials said little or no money would come from public funds because of a plan to use private investments to construct the start-up toll network and open the lanes to motorists sooner. That will free up more money from the state to be used for other needed projects, they said.

But critics of the plan say they doubt the transportation department’s need for more money and believe its plan to add toll lanes to relieve traffic will manipulate traffic congestion for profit.

“They overspend, and they are a picture of bloated government bureaucracy that needs to tighten its own belt and get its own house in order before it asks drivers to pay a toll tax to existing highways,” said Terri Hall, regional director and founder of San Antonio Toll Party, an organization opposed to tolls on roads or rights of way already paid for with tax dollars.

The group recently scored a victory when the Federal Highway Administration pulled environmental clearances on U.S. 281 toll road projects, halting construction for a year or more pending another environmental assessment.

But the department and the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority are moving forward with the Loop 1604 and U.S. 281 project. TxDOT lent $1 million to the ARMA to evaluate competing proposals to construct the project from two private consortiums, the Cintra Zachry Partnership and the Macquarie 1604 Partnership.

Hall said there are potential legal avenues that opponents can pursue with the Loop 1604 project, but TxDOT and RMA officials said they’re studying the environmental impact thoroughly.

Frank Holzmann, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation, said there isn’t yet a construction timeline for the loop project, but he anticipates the department will receive clearance to begin in January 2008, pending environmental clearances.

The idea, he said, is to add two toll lanes in each direction in the median between the lanes that exist now. The current lanes will remain or may be moved out to make room for the toll lanes, he said.

“We’ve done the modeling, and the reason we’ve come up with the lanes we have is we think it will handle the growth (that’s expected on the North Side),” he said.

Drivers could have toll stickers the size of inspection stickers that would allow them to drive through tolling gantries that would electronically charge the driver at each station without requiring them to stop, he said.

“If you think about it, all that traffic that’s going there now, there will be the same people that will say they will never pay the toll, but others like me will pay the toll,” Holzmann said. “You’re paying for convenience, essentially.”

Although the toll rate hasn’t been set, TxDOT is reviewing an amount of about 15 cents a mile, he said. That will change according to inflation, he added.

Hall said the only way to make toll roads work is to price them high enough to keep them flowing. Making them affordable would cause them to be just as congested as the free roads, she said.

“If tolls were so cheap or affordable that everybody could drive on them, they would be so congested because everyone would drive on them,” she said. “To make them work, you have to have free lanes congested and make them so miserable so you want to drive on the toll lanes.

“Those that can afford tolls get congestion relief.”

On the Northwest Side, to expand the loop from Highway 151 to Interstate 10 West using only public funds would take another 19 years, Holzmann said.

“By tolling, we are able to accelerate these projects,” he said. “There is some funding, but it was a number of years out. By tolling, we’re able to accelerate the projects and get them constructed where they are needed.”

Hall doesn’t buy that.

“They promised this to us when they planned (Loop) 1604: It was supposed to be a six-lane highway, but they only had money to build four lanes so they promised money was programmed and set for other lanes within three years. But suddenly they said they were out of money and the only way we will have the highway fixed is if we have toll lanes,” she said.

Natalie Gonzalez, 23, has lived in North San Antonio all her life. She now lives off of Loop 1604 and Hausman and said she’s seen the city’s population explode over the years. It’s not a small town any more, she said, but she’s not sure toll roads are the answer. She may buy a toll pass if the lanes are built, but it all depends on how much it costs.

“Most people who live out here probably can afford it, but probably what would become difficult is multiple vehicles per house,” she said. “I think there are a lot against it, but ultimately we cannot deny the city has grown tremendously.”

Chris Lench, 56, lived in Los Angeles and Washington D.C. before moving to San Antonio. He said he knows something about gridlock, and based on his experience in Los Angeles, specifically the tolling of State Route 91, he also knows about toll systems that don’t work.

“It won’t work,” he said of the local proposal. “It’s doomed before the get-go.”

If people can drive for free, they will, he said. The toll roads will lose money and fail, he predicts.

The answer to transportation nightmares, Lench said, is public transportation.

“All the great cities of the world — Tokyo, Paris, London, New York, Moscow — have good public transportation (systems) that are cost-effective and efficient,” he said.

Jan Gabel, 53, drives Loop 1604 about five times a week. She said she’d pay for the convenience that toll lanes offer. As someone who lived with the toll system in Dallas, she’s used to it, she said. (Note to Ms. Gabel: you got to VOTE on the toll roads in Dallas, it was a brand new road, not slapping tolls on funded, existing freeways, it was a flat toll rate, not charge by mile, and the money stayed local and wasn’t turned over to foreign management in secret deals with no cap on how high the toll rates will go!)

“My time is worth paying a toll every once in a while,” she said. “I think it’s a great idea. I think it will free up traffic a lot and there will be a lot less accidents, especially with all the growth here.”

See latest Rasmussen poll here.

POLL DATA

Election 2006
Texas Governor
Rick Perry (R) 40%
Carole Keeton Strayhorn (I) 31%
Chris Bell (D) 13%
Kinky Friedman 9%

Election 2006
Texas Governorv
Rick Perry (R) 38%
Carole Keeton Strayhorn (I) 29%
Bob Gammage (D) 18%
Kinky Friedman 8%

Texas Governor: Perry (R) Still at 40%
Strayhorn Gains Ground
Survey of 500 Likely Voters
Conducted February 6, 2006

February 14, 2006–Carole Keeton Strayhorn’s defection from the GOP to run for Governor as an Independent is making things interesting in President Bush’s home state.

In the six weeks since Strayhorn announced plans for an Independent challenge, her support has increased ten percentage points. She is now within single digits of catching Governor Rick Perry. Depending upon which Democrat is added in the mix, Perry leads Strayhorn either 40% to 31% or 38% to 29%.
In our January election poll for Texas, Strayhorn earned 21% of the vote.
Both Democratic contenders currently attract less than 20% of voters and a fourth competitor, Richard “Kinky” Friedman is in the high single digits. At the moment, the Democrats and Friedman appear as by-standers in a Republican civil war.

Perry does better among conservatives while Strayhorn draws more support from moderates and liberals.Perry has a solid edge among Republican voters, but Strayhorn has a nearly 20-point advantage over the incumbent among unaffiliated voters.

Perry is still the favorite in this race, but the unusual dynamic of a Republican official bolting the party to challenge a Republican Governor could make for a wild political season in Texas.

Strayhorn is viewed favorably by 55% of voters in Texas and unfavorably by 31%. For Perry, the numbers are 53% favorable and 45% unfavorable.

Rasmussen Reports is an electronic publishing firm specializing in the collection, publication, and distribution of public opinion polling information.

Rasmussen Reports was the nation’s most accurate polling firm during the Presidential election and the only one to project both Bush and Kerry’s vote total within half a percentage point of the actual outcome.

During Election 2004, RasmussenReports.com was also the top-ranked public opinion research site on the web. We had twice as many visitors as our nearest competitor and nearly as many as all competitors combined.

Scott Rasmussen, president of Rasmussen Reports, has been an independent pollster for more than a decade.

The telephone survey of 500 Likely Voters was conducted by Rasmussen Reports February 6, 2006. The margin of sampling error for the survey is +/- 4.5 percentage points at the midpoint with a 95% level of confidence.

Link to the Herald-Zeitung article.

Macias’ advantage increases by 2 in race
By Leigh Jones
The Herald-Zeitung
Published March 15, 2006

Nathan Macias’ lead in the District 73 Texas House race grew by two votes Tuesday when elections officials in Comal and Gillespie counties counted additional ballots from the March 7 Republican primary.

Comal County elections officials counted 10 overseas and one provisional ballot.

Macias earned seven votes, while his Republican primary opponent, incumbent Carter Casteel, garnered three. Six of the seven provisional ballots originally expected to count in the race were thrown out because the voters who cast them were not registered.

The 11th ballot was counted as an under vote because the voter only registered decisions for the Republican initiatives, not any of the candidates.

The two outstanding Gillespie County overseas ballots were both added to Casteel’s total, bringing the separation between the candidates to 47 votes.

Casteel told the Herald-Zeitung she was not surprised by the outcome and still intended to go through with her planned recount.

“I don’t expect any of this to change anything. We just have to ride it out,” she said. “As much as has been said about this race, everyone will be better off once it’s been double checked. That way no one can come back later and say it could have been different.”

If any more overseas ballots come in before the March 20 deadline, elections officials will meet again to count them, but Republican Party leaders are scheduled to meet today to certify the vote as it now stands.

Casteel then will have 48 hours to make the official recount call in Comal County.

Bandera County officials also will meet today to count their last three outstanding mail-in ballots, giving Casteel an additional 24 hours to call for the recount there.

The process, which Casteel insists is only for the benefit of her supporters, will be expensive for the beaten incumbent, who must pay for all of the associated costs. She has estimated that recounting the ballots from all precincts in the four-county district will cost roughly $3,500. District 73 covers Comal, Bandera, Gillespie and Kendall counties.

Some in GOP Regretting Pork-Stuffed Highway Bill
By Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 5, 2005; A01

The highway bill seemed like such a good idea when it sailed through Congress this summer. But now Republicans who assembled the record spending package are suffering buyer’s remorse.

The $286 billion legislation was stuffed with 6,000 pet projects for lawmakers’ districts, including what critics denounce as a $223 million “Bridge to Nowhere” that would replace a 7-minute ferry ride in a sparsely populated area of Alaska. Usually members of Congress cannot wait to rush home and brag about such bounty — a staggering number of parking lots, bus depots, bike paths and new interchanges for just about every congressional district in the country that added $24 billion to the overall cost of maintaining the nation’s highways and bridges in the coming years.

But with spiraling war and hurricane recovery costs, the pork-laden bill has become a political albatross for Republicans, who have been promising since President Bush took office to get rid of wasteful spending.

“Does it make all the difference in the world? No,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), one of four senators who voted against the highway bill. “But there’s a great deal of symbolism associated with whether we’re going to add $24 billion to the debt in unwanted and unnecessary pork-barrel projects.”

Conservative groups, government watchdogs and ordinary folks around the country are so offended by the size of the legislation — signed into law by Bush in early August — that efforts are underway in the House and the Senate to rescind or reallocate a portion of its funds.

Lawmakers say voters are stopping them back home to ask whether the “Bridge to Nowhere” is a joke or whether it actually exists. It is no joke. The project, championed by Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), would link tiny Ketchikan, with a population of 8,900, with its airport on Gravina Island — population 50.

Former House majority leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), who was instrumental in shaping the highway bill in the House, apologized for its excesses during an appearance on Thursday before the Heritage Foundation.

In a speech to a group of conservative academics and policy experts, DeLay blamed the runaway spending of recent years on minority Democrats. When he took questions, the first came from a senior official at the American Conservative Union, who asked DeLay, “How large does the Republican majority in the House and Senate need to be before Republicans act like the fiscal conservative I thought we were?”

“I’m not here to defend the highway bill,” DeLay responded. He described the overall 1,000-page legislation, which funds major interstate, bridge and mass transit projects and distributes gasoline tax revenue to states according to a formula, as an important economic development tool. He conceded that Congress may have gone a bit overboard.

“Our responsibility, that frankly we didn’t perform very well, is to make sure those are legitimate earmarks for legitimate reasons,” DeLay said, referring to the pet projects.

McCain and six other Senate Republicans want to reallocate the pork dollars in the bill to help pay for the damage caused by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), one of eight House members who opposed the legislation, and who declined any special projects for his district, wants to rescind 10 percent of the bill’s total cost and allow states to disregard the pet projects authorized by the legislation, and spend the money as they wish.

“My guess is that most states would gladly forgo 10 percent of their funding for the ability to make funding decisions,” Flake said.

The Senate has already considered one proposal to scale back the legislation — an amendment offered by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) to cut funding for some of the projects special-ordered by Alaskan lawmakers and use the money saved to rebuild the Interstate 10 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain outside New Orleans. The I-10 bridge, a major transportation corridor, was shattered during the Katrina storm surge. Coburn’s bid failed, but it gained widespread attention and attracted 15 Senate “yes” votes, a landslide, considering the political clout of Stevens, a former chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a formidable force in Congress. In a display of outrage, Stevens threatened to resign from the Senate if Coburn’s measure succeeded.

Stevens and other Alaska lawmakers have been masterful at steering federal aid to their thinly populated state. According to a tally by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group, Alaska received $1 billion for 120 special projects. In total funding, it ranks third, behind California and Illinois.

The highway bill has long been a reliable source of pork-barrel spending, and it has been used by Republican and Democratic leaders to reward or punish rank-and-file members. President Ronald Reagan once vetoed a highway bill because it contained 152 pet projects. Despite the pork inflation, Bush had no complaints about the current package when he signed it on Aug. 10. “This bill upgrades our transportation infrastructure,” he declared. “And it accomplishes goals in a fiscally responsible way.”

That was before Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, leaving tens of thousands homeless and requiring billions of dollars in unanticipated rebuilding costs. Trying to live within a tight budget, Republican leaders in the House and the Senate are in the process of pushing through politically difficult cuts in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, farm subsidies and student loans.

The Club for Growth, a conservative group that funds like-minded candidates for Congress, has turned the highway legislation into a bumper sticker for the GOP’s fiscal failings. “Too many Congressional Republicans have veered away from the limited government agenda that got them elected to the majority in Congress. They have approved pork-barrel highway bills worse than the Democrats used to give us,” says one appeal to supporters.