Link to article here.

Senator Robert Nichols removed the State Auditor from oversight over these private toll rip-offs, called CDAs, in his bill SB 1669 (which didn’t pass), so he is likely the one who removed the Attorney General from any oversight in the TxDOT sunset bill, HB 300 (which also didn’t pass). Nichols knew what none of us did yet, that Attorney General Greg Abbott was holding up the two big North TX CDAs. Guess the BIG MONEY got  to Nichols and/or the senators who were members of the HB 300 conference committee, Nichols, Glenn Hegar, Juan Hinojosa, Kirk Watson, and John Carona.

Taxpayer advocate and private property rights hero Rep. Lois Kolkhorst’s big contribution to the original sunset bill (that got stripped in the senate) was to have the Attorney General and Comptroller certify every CDA with their own signature on the dotted line. She instinctively knew that any politician who aspires to higher office would never sign their own name to such a taxpayer rip-off. She was right. We must insist her provision stays in ANY bill addressing CDAs. However, we predict this move by Abbott will be the death-knell for CDAs for good. FYI, the Legislature DID NOT re-authorize CDAs so they are set to sunset August 31. Let’s see if Perry addresses that in the call for the anticipated special session…

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott refuses to OK North Texas tollway contract
Friday, June 12, 2009
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER / The Dallas Morning News

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has refused to sign off on the first of two major private toll road projects approved for North Texas earlier this year.

Abbott said provisions in the contract with the Spanish firm Cintra, which is slated to build the North Tarrant Express in Fort Worth and the mid-cities, violate the Texas Constitution and must be amended.State law gives Abbott the power to hold up the contracts indefinitely if they are not “legally sufficient.”

Negotiations between his office and the department have already extended for weeks beyond an initial 60-day deadline.

Cintra has agreed to spend billions in North Texas to build the North Tarrant Express toll road and to rebuild the LBJ Freeway.

But in return, the state department of transportation has pledged more than $1 billion in tax dollars toward the projects. As a result, main lanes on both highways will be free, but Cintra will collect tolls for 52 years on adjacent lanes.

The LBJ Freeway contract has not yet been reviewed, but it is likely to be saddled with the same legal issues.

Abbott said the department’s contract for the North Tarrant Express obligates the state to pay $740 million over several years to Cintra.

“The Texas Constitution says that one Legislature cannot financially bind a future Legislature,” he said.

The contract must be amended to reflect that any promises for payment are subject to discretion of future sessions of the Legislature, Abbott said.

Any provision that leaves payments from the state subject to future action by the Legislature could give Cintra pause.

TxDOT continues to work to meet Abbott’s objections and to settle on terms agreeable to Cintra, spokesman Chris Lippincott said.

Link to article here.

Politics and the Financial Crisis Slow the Drive to Privatize

Left, William Thomas Cain/Getty Images; John Gress/Reuters

A deal to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike, left, failed last year. Private operation of Chicago parking meters has run into criticism.
By LESLIE WAYNE

New York Times
June 4, 2009 It was hailed as a win-win for Main Street and Wall Street — a way for states and cities, along with financiers, to make some money.

But now privatization, the selling of public airports, bridges, roads and the like to private investors, looks like a boom that wasn’t. Deals are collapsing. Airy hopes of quick profits are vanishing. And what was celebrated as a new wave in finance is, for the moment, barely making a ripple.

What happened? The financial crisis, for starters. The easy money that Wall Street was counting on to finance its purchases has largely disappeared. Then the Obama administration unintentionally damped interest with its $787 billion economic stimulus package, a windfall that local governments are now racing to spend.

Bankers concede they got a bit ahead of themselves. When times were good, investment banks and private investment funds raised billions of dollars in hopes of buying infrastructure. But many state and local governments resisted selling because of money, politics or both.

Some deals turned out to be less lucrative than these would-be sellers had hoped. Government officials also began questioning whether taxpayers would be better off if infrastructure were in private hands. After Chicago sold its parking system to a private operator, for instance, drivers had to feed meters with as many as 28 quarters to park for two hours.

“We will see a few transactions,” said Fred Pollock, a vice president at Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, a private equity fund. “But we know what we won’t see — a tidal wave of projects.”

Some big names still want to enter this business, among them Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Such investors have raised about $180 billion for global infrastructure projects. Large funds have also been established in Australia, Britain and Bahrain, where such public-private partnerships are more common. More than 20 states enacted legislation in recent years to allow some form of private-sector investment that would help fill budget gaps and repair crumbling roads, bridges and even airports.

But now the deals are falling apart. In April, a much-anticipated $2.5 billion plan to privatize Midway Airport in Chicago collapsed after a group of investors was unable to obtain debt financing. The deal, which had been in the works for four years, was to have been the first in a Federal Aviation Administration project that would have allowed up to five major airports to move into private hands.

Midway was just the latest setback. The biggest was the failure last fall of the largest deal proposed to date — a $12.8 billion lease of the Pennsylvania Turnpike to an investor group headed by Citigroup and a Spanish investment firm. Postmortems into that failed effort show that privatization advocates vastly underestimated the political opposition the deal would stir up in the Pennsylvania legislature.

Late last month plans to privatize “Alligator Alley,” a 78-mile stretch of Florida highway that connects Fort Lauderdale with Naples, collapsed when no bidders showed up. The failure has had a ripple effect — in Mississippi, state officials have pushed back the bidding schedule for a new 12-mile toll road.

Then there is the $1.2 billion privatization of 36,000 parking meters in Chicago. In the five months since the deal took effect, widespread complaints about poor service and rising parking rates have created a political firestorm for the Chicago City Council. Public opposition was so strong that on Wednesday the council approved a delay in voting on any future asset sales.

Chicago public officials have called the work of the private operator, Chicago Parking Meters L.L.C., “simply unacceptable.” For its part, the operator has apologized and announced it would delay price increases at the meters.

Proponents of public-to-private asset sales point to the $1.8 billion lease of the 7.8-mile Chicago Skyway in 2004 and the $3.8 billion raised by Indiana through a 75-year lease of its toll road in 2006 as successful pioneering efforts.

In Indiana, the money went to pay for a 10-year highway infrastructure program, and Gov. Mitch Daniels was re-elected last year promoting the lease, despite bumper stickers that read “Keep the Toll Road, Lease Mitch.”

The stimulus money, as well as other infrastructure money promised by Congress, has provided temporary relief for cash-poor municipalities. But this situation will not last forever.

“They still have expenses, and revenues will not keep up,” Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said of state and local governments. “Some states will have to look at asset sales and decide. Once we step back from this crisis mode, I think they will be looked at again.”

If the market revives, the problems that scuttled recent deals may provide some lessons. In the case of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, politics clearly played a role in the deal’s collapse. A study by the Pew Center on the States found that proponents of the deal had overpromised what the turnpike could fetch and had failed to make it clear where the money would go.

After indicating that the turnpike might be valued at as much as $26 billion, when the winning $12.8 billion bid came in lawmakers felt it looked too small. Even more, there was concern that the money would be squandered and that the state was putting a valuable asset into foreign hands, since the top bidder included a Spanish company.

“It simply wasn’t a sufficient bid by a long shot,” said Joseph F. Markosek, a state legislator and head of the Pennsylvania House Transportation Committee.

Similar sentiments are coming into play in Florida, where few had expected Alligator Alley to be leased. “I believe the private partnership is like fool’s gold,” said David Aronberg, a state senator in south Florida who has led the fight against privatization. “It only looks good from afar.”

WE DID IT!
HB 300 IS DEAD!

Thank you for all the phone calls and emails to your legislators, and for your support and sacrifices to come to Austin to give testimony to these committees and hung in there when it felt like they weren’t listening and would NEVER do right by the PEOPLE of this great State.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for sticking with us through these 5 months of hard-fought battles during the session and for many of us, years of uphill struggles to bring accountability and fix transportation policies that are outright rip-offs. Without this grassroots army, the train wreck would have continued unabated with untold damage.

Play by play…
The final version of the bill from conference committee wasn’t even posted until 11:40 PM Saturday night. We had 24 hours to read a 1,000 page bill….IMPOSSIBLE! I was able to get a side by side report of the actual, final changes in text (that report was 178 pages!) and managed to inform lawmakers of the horrible provisions still left in HB 300 to give us ammo to KILL HB 300. Read them here.

We put out a call for supporters to meet us at the Capitol yesterday for a last push to prevent lawmakers from selling off Texas highways to foreign corporations and KILL HB 300. When we arrived, word got out that Senator John Carona announced he was going to filibuster HB 300 because his “local option” 10 cent gas tax hike was taken out of the bill.

Support in the House started to waiver as it appeared HB 300 was going down in the Senate. The House bill wasn’t eligible for a vote until 11:40 PM, just 20 minutes before the clock ran out. If they couldn’t pass it, they still had to pass the safety net bill before the stroke of midnight. It was going to be tricky!

An added wrinkle…
We found out about some chicanery with the safety net bill (after hearing we were trying to kill the sunset bill and push TxDOT’s sunset to next session). HB 300 author Carl Isett magically changed TxDOT’s sunset date in the safety net bill to 4 years instead of the 2 years as it was originally written. Apparently this was a move to force lawmakers to choke down his anti-taxpayer, anti-reform HB 300 under the guise that it was better than nothing. But rather it smacked of dirty politics to try and say, “you take our bill or get no change at TxDOT for 4 years.”

After we made the rounds and staffers were tight-lipped about their reps position for or against the bill, Rep. Vicki Truitt threatened to filibuster HB 300 in the House (following Carona’s footsteps, she wanted the 10 cent gas tax hike and was willing to KILL the bill over it).

Then, House Transportation Chairman Joe Pickett at one point threatened to “release the conferees” and call up the senate bill for a vote instead of the House bill hoping to vote it down handily to send a message to the Senate that the House didn’t want their bill. School children behave better than these people. The Senate version was chalk full of the WORST provisions imaginable (worst case scenario), including the 10 cent gas tax hike. So I didn’t find the move particularly funny. It was an awful scare until I figured out what Pickett was doing.

By the time the dust settled, it was 11:40 PM and they never called up HB 300 (already declaring it DEAD, for all the wrong reasons, but dead nonetheless) and went straight to the safety bill. Now the safety net bill, having been hijacked and no way to change it since all the final version of bills had to have been filed by midnight Saturday, needed to DIE. We couldn’t let TxDOT off the hook for another 4 years. But if the safety net bill didn’t pass, TxDOT would be dissolved (many would cheer such a scenario, but not lawmakers who live and die by getting road projects built for their districts).

So Rep., David Leibowitz led the charge and stalled passage of the bill and midnight came and went and NO HB 300 and NO safety bill passed.

TxDOT ABOLISHED (for a few hours)
For about 16 hours, TxDOT was officially ABOLISHED! Oh, I slept well last night…

Today, the House was only to do technical changes (like remove conflicts within bills, mismarked section numbers and the like), but they AGAIN broke their own rules and managed to extend TxDOT for another 2 years (which was the original plan, just a lot more messy!) through a resolution. Lawmakers would do anything to avoid a special session, so they snuck the continuation of TxDOT into a resolution on stimulus funds (and where to deposit them).

The House officially adjourned, sine die only moments ago. While we didn’t reform the agency and get the GOOD provisions passed, we averted diaster and CDAs, that sell our highways to foreign companies, sunset August 31. If CDAs die, TTC-35 dies with it. The TTC-69 was excepted OUT of the moratorium bill last session (which we vehemently opposed), so CDA contracts for that corridor can continue until 2011.

The local government 391 commissions we’ve been forming all over the state will now be the only thing (aside from litigation) standing between East Texas and a possible 1,200 foot wide Trans Texas Corridor!

CDAs may have been snuck into another bill somewhere…
With the “chubbing” over Voter ID, many bills died in the House. So the Senate started attaching their bills to House bills and there were a flurry of conference committee reports filed at midnight Saturday with no way to read them all to see if CDAs got snuck into a bill. Considering the House arrived at sine die before the senate today, and since both chambers routinely suspend their own rules, the Senate may have slipped CDAs into a bill today AFTER knwoing for certain that CDAs will sunset this summer absent the passage of HB 300.

What’s also uncertain is what happens to the bills that gave RMAs the authority to enter into CDAs if CDAs are going to sunset? Which law will take precedence over the other? So there are many open questions and disaster may be lurking around the corner. But for today, we can enjoy a BIG VICTORY #2!

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Austin, TX – May 28, 2009) The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) sunset bill, HB 300, now over 1,500 pages long, has too much baggage for taxpayers to swallow. HB 300 ends the private toll moratorium (which hands our PUBLIC highways to PRIVATE, foreign toll operators), keeps the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) alive, opens a new loophole to toll existing freeways, allows counties a 10 cent gas tax hike, raids public employee pension funds to invest in risky private toll roads deals (Revolving Fund/Transportation Bank), reduces the number of elected officials on transportation boards, and more.

A heavy piece of “baggage” that put the grassroots over the edge was Amendment #1 by Senator Glenn Hegar that slipped the Trans Texas Corridor back into the bill after repeatedly assuring lawmakers during floor debate that the Trans Texas Corridor is “DEAD.”

TURF also obtained a memo last week from lobbyist Gary Bushell, with Alliance for I-69, revealing that he and ex-Transportation Commissioner turned Texas Senator, Robert Nichols, brokered a deal to allow the private toll contract with ACS of Spain for the Trans Texas Corridor TTC-69 to proceed as planned, despite the outcry of more than 28,000 Texans who went on the record against the project. (See the negotiated amendment to Nichol’s SB 17 that protects the private investor’s interest over the public interest here).

Bushell is the same lobbyist the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) illegally hired using taxpayer money to lobby elected officials in the path of the TTC, which is the subject of several bills before the Texas Legislature in response to a TURF lawsuit currently awaiting a ruling by the Third District Court of Appeals.

“So this backroom deal-making not only betrays Texans, including those in Hegar and Nichols’ own districts, it’s also a betrayal of his fellow legislators who have voted to repeal and repeatedly promised the public that the Trans Texas Corridor is ‘dead,’” proclaims an outraged Terri Hall, Director of Texas TURF.

Also slipped into the senate version is a bill by Senator Tommy Williams to add license plate cameras to state highways, Senator John Carona’s bill to lift the cap on payments to LOSING BIDDERS on toll contracts (used to be $1 million cap, then in 2007 dropped down to $250,000, now there would be NO limit), and a provision to allow TxDOT to increase speed limits on the Trans Texas Corridor and certain toll roads up to 85 MPH with the intent of reducing speed limits on competing free roads (to drive more traffic to high speed toll roads).

“HB 300 abandoned the original Sunset committee recommendations long ago, and it’s been loaded up with too many anti-reform, anti-freedom, anti-taxpayer provisions for Texans to choke down,” states Hall.

TURF is advocating the legislature KILL HB 300 and pass what’s called a safety net bill that moves TxDOT’s sunset to next session, when they hope Texans will have a new Governor.

“No meaningful reform of this agency is possible as long as Rick Perry hold a veto pen,” Hall predicts.

Terri Hall is the Founder of Texas TURF. TURF is a non-partisan grassroots group of  citizens concerned about toll road policy and the Trans Texas Corridor. TURF promotes non-toll transportation solutions. For more information, please visit their web site at: www.TexasTURF.org.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Austin, TX – May 19, 2009) The Texas House is set to vote on whether to end the moratorium on private toll contracts and vote to re-authorize them for another 4 years. Comprehensive Development Agreements, called CDAs in Texas (also known as public private partnerships or PPPs), would hand over an untold number of our PUBLIC highways to PRIVATE, mostly foreign, corporations for a half century at a time. Senator John Carona’s bill, SB 404, is eligible to be taken up by the full House tomorrow.

“Texans don’t want their PUBLIC highway system sold to the highest bidder, nor do they want corporate-run toll roads that cost commuters 75 cents a mile to get to work,” said Terri Hall, Founder of Texas TURF.

Private toll road contracts are due to sunset this fall. In 2007, Texans stood-up and demanded a moratorium on CDAs and sent a bill to the Governor with a combined vote of 169-5.

“The public is largely unaware of what our politicians are about to ram through. They think they took care of it two years ago only to wake-up to find the nightmare continues unabated,” Hall notes.

These deals cost taxpayers 50% more, are failing all over the country, and result in extremely high tolls, like the DFW contracts just signed with Spain-based Cintra that will charge commuters 75 cents a mile to get to work. That’s $3,000 a year in new toll taxes.

In fact, just days ago, Florida’s “Alligator Alley” couldn’t get a single bidder to privatize that tollway. TURF thinks lawmakers need to wake-up to the economic realities that selling our highways to the highest bidder, and relying on rosy traffic counts that amount to pure speculation to make these multi-billion dollar boondoggles work will fall flat, leaving the taxpayers to bailout yet more corporations.

“Public infrastructure that Texans depend on for daily living shouldn’t be under the control of private companies whose primary motive, naturally, is profit, not the public interest,” states Hall.

TURF believes that especially in these economic times, the higher toll rates charged by these foreign toll operators are completely unsustainable. CDAs also eat-up our existing gas tax and other public funds to privatize and toll our public roads, taking away virtually ALL of our available funding for non-toll roads.

CDAs are the most risky and most expensive method of delivering toll projects. Testimony from Dennis Enright of Northwest Financial in New Jersey before the Senate Transportation Committee March 1, 2007, seems to have been quickly forgotten by the Legislature. Mr. Enright said there is no risk transfer to the private entity and that CDAs cost the taxpayers of a minimum of 50% more than public toll roads. Mr. Enright rightly called toll roads monopolies by their very nature. He also said it’s always best to keep these projects in the public NOT private sector.

A second bill, SB 17 authored by Senator Robert Nichols, is tied to Carona’s SB 404. If the House votes to re-authorize CDAs, it’s contingent upon SB 17 passing as well. SB 17 purports to protect the public from private toll contracts and make CDAs only a last resort. However, the way the current bill, SB 17, is structured, if the public toll entity cannot get the financing together to do a public toll road, they’d have to pass the project to TxDOT who would hand it to the private developer.

“The bill doesn’t give the public any protection, but shows TxDOT how it can just wait it out and then hand projects to the private companies,” Hall points out.

The bill also allows the whole evaluation process to be waived and TxDOT and public tolling entities can jump precipitously into CDAs.

“So what’s the point of the bill, if they can waive the requirements and get a free pass?” asks Hall.

Texas examples…

The recent I-820 deal in Tarrant County uses a host of public money (gas taxes, federal TIFIA loans, private activity bonds or PABs) to subsidize this PRIVATE toll contract, yet Cintra gets the right to toll Texans for 50 years and take all the profits out of state. In fact, TxDOT plunked down more cash for the project than did Cintra! (Read it here.)

The LBJ freeway CDA project to toll I-635 uses public employee pension funds to invest in the deal, with toll rates of 75 cents a mile and can rise monthly. TxDOT will even pay Cintra for the loss of the “prevailing toll” revenues due to HOV users and Cintra is guaranteed 12% to 23% PROFIT! (Read more here.)

Their models show only 10 & 11% of all traffic will be able to afford to take these billion-dollar toll lanes. The congestion, or variable, tolling actually jacks-up the toll rates to guarantee certain speeds or pay TxDOT a penalty for slower travel times. This means they purposely price cars off the toll lanes as a financial incentive.

“So what’s the point of all this risky, multi-generational leveraged debt? Mobility or making money? We’re headed for an infrastructure bubble that is destined to fail, which is likely to ensure massive taxpayer bailouts when they do. All those cars not on the toll road will be sitting in traffic, contributing to our air quality issues and being late to work while still paying taxes for highways (gas tax) and not getting a thing for it,” Hall observes.

TURF is urging Texans to call their State Representative and tell them not to let private corporations takeover our public highways. Tell them “NO” to SB 404 and SB 17, and “NO” to more sweetheart deals.

Read how CDAs are failing all over the world on our CDA Fact Sheet here.

Terri Hall is the Founder of Texas TURF. TURF is a non-partisan grassroots group of  citizens concerned about toll road policy and the Trans Texas Corridor. TURF promotes non-toll transportation solutions. For more information, please visit their web site at: www.TexasTURF.org.

HB 300 Update

VICTORY #1 comes with a sting

GOOD NEWS:
NO TOLLS ON EXISTING ROADS, REPEAL OF TRANS TEXAS CORRIDOR, and ELECTED LEADERSHIP at TxDOT GET IN THE BILL!

BAD NEWS:
PRIVATE TOLL CONTRACTS SNUCK INTO BILL WHEN HALF THE HOUSE ABSENT!

SEE URGENT ACTION ITEM BELOW

Here’s how it happened…

First, Rep. Jose Menendez of San Antonio withdrew his amendment to re-authorize the private toll contracts (CDAs) that sell our highways to foreign corporations & another BAD amendment involving CDAs by Wayne Smith of Baytown was also withdrawn during debate last night. There were actually three amendments to re-authorize private toll contracts and END the moratorium Texans demanded and they are: Rep. Jose Menendez of San Antonio, Rep. Stephen Frost of Atlanta, and Rep. Larry Phillips.

Last night when the majority of HB 300 was heard, the author of the bill, Rep. Carl Isett said that private toll contracts (CDAs) would be dealt with in committee next week, so House members thought disaster was averted. Then, this morning when they took up the rest of the bill with what was dubbed the non-controversial stuff, when half the House wasn’t even on the floor, Phillips got his amendment voted through, without a recorded vote, without a whimper of opposition totally under the radar!

WE MUST STRIP Phillips’ CDA sweetheart deals OUT ON THIRD READING OF THE BILL, HB 300, Monday!

THE GOOD NEWS:
Thanks to your calls and emails, we prevailed on many GOOD key battles against the BIG MONEY & lobbyists who have wined and dined our legislators for nearly a decade to swindle Texans into these sweetheart deals (while they laugh all the way to the bank). A HUGE hats off to the leadership of Rep. David Leibowitz of San Antonio and Rep. Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham for leading the charge to get these MAJOR amendments into HB 300. Texans owe them a HUGE debt of gratitude. They never faltered, they never wavered, they are true Texas HEROES of our cause! But this is just the first step. WE MUST STRIP OUT Phillips’ private toll contract provision that sell our highways to the highest bidder UPON THIRD READING OF THE HOUSE BILL, HB 300, Monday!

Hang in there with us to see this through…

We’re still sorting through all the various amendments, but the other BIG news is we changed the HORRIBLE loophole-laden language and amended HB 300 with a BULLET-PROOF prohibition on tolling existing roads! We’ve fought hard for 4 years (some of our folks in Austin have been fighting for going on 5 years) to FINALLY resolve this nightmare! We’re on the edge of REAL victory. So stick with us!

Then, we also got a complete REPEAL of the Trans Texas Corridor into HB 300 (though Joe Pickett tried to strip it back out in a sneaky amendment). It’s nothing short of a MIRACLE! On top of that, we managed to get ELECTED leadership at TxDOT! Though not a single elected commissioner, the consensus was behind Rep. Leibowitz’ amendment to ELECT 14 REGIONAL commissioners and one statewide commissioner to run TxDOT. THAT IS AN ENORMOUS VICTORY for accountability and reform of this rogue agency!

Several of our other amendments also got in and some were withdrawn or tabled. HB 300 is a 200 page bill that had 166 proposed amendments, so when we get all the adopted amendments sorted out, y’all will be the first to know.

WE MUST FIGHT TO KEEP OUR AMENDMENTS IN THIS BILL!
HB 300 needs to survive a third reading in the House then…Next up, the Senate!

The Dallas/Ft. Worth delegation is in abject panic over the Leibowitz amendment prohibiting tolls on existing roads. They fear 820, 635, and others won’t be able to move forward if the bill passes with his amendment. So there will still be a battle on the third reading of the bill, with North Texas legislators likely trying to carve out specific projects from the prohibition on tolling existing highways. So our folks in DFW had better flood your legislators with calls to have your voices heard.

Senators to the PEOPLE: “You won’t get your amendments”…
Then, the REAL fight will be in the Senate where Senator John Carona told me pointblank at the beginning of the session that we the people would NOT get elected leadership at TxDOT, period! He also rammed private toll contracts (CDAs) through the Senate. In addition, Senator Robert Nichols told me that only HIS loophole-laden version of the bill dealing with tolling existing roads would pass this session.

What’s at stake…
So get those phones ringing and keep them ringing! If we don’t KILL CDAs, foreign corporations will have the power to control EVERY MILE WE DRIVE for a half century at a time! The deals already in the works will cost the average commuter over $3,000 a YEAR in new toll taxes. If we don’t GET a REAL ban on tolling existing highways and get stuck with Nichols’ loopholes, our freeways will be converted to tollways unabated!

CALL NOW!

Call your state legislators and tell them NO CDAs & keep the Leibowitz version of no tolls on existing roads! We will NOT accept their cow dung in order to get our good amendments!

Repeat this message…

1) No private toll contracts that sell our highways to foreign corporations (strip Phillips sneaky amendment to extend these contracts that end the moratorium!)
2) YES to Leibowitz’ version of BAN on tolling existing roads (freeway to tollway conversions, a HUGE double tax rip-off)
3) No Trans Texas Corridor
4) YES to elected leadership at TxDOT

Find your state legislators here.

Call the Capitol switchboard (512) 463-4630 between 8 AM – 5 PM. To reach your legislators after 5 pm or over the weekend, get his/her direct phone numbers here…

You can also email your state legislators by using this formula:

Plug in the name of your STATE Representative to: firstname.lastname@house.state.tx.us

Plug in the name of your STATE Senator to:
firstname.lastname@senate.state.tx.us

But at this stage of the game,
PHONE CALLS ARE BETTER!

Link to article here.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Transportation “bank” gets Senate approval
Texas Monthly blog

posted by Patricia Kilday Hart at 12:45 PM

The Texas Senate just gave unanimous approval to Sen. John Carona’s SB 1350, which sets up the Texas Transportation Revolving Fund — a transportation “bank,” really — that will leverage $1 billion in transportation bonds authorized by Prop 12.  According to the bill’s analysis, the revolving fund will allow funds to be continuously recycle: the sale of loans will provide additional capital to the fund.

Carona was held up in passage only by a string of laudatory speeches, started by Finance chair Steve Ogden who complimented Carona’s “creativity” in setting up the fund, which could provide up to $20 billion in financing. The revolving fund could provide a vehicle for the Texas Retirement System and Employee Retirement System to invest in state infrastructure, a policy Ogden supports.

However, Ogden noted after passage of the bill that the Senate budget bill provides for debt service to fund the Prop. 12 transportation bonds, while the House’s budget bill does not. He hopes to persuade the House conferees to support the concept — which allows the state to use sales tax revenue, and not just the gas tax, to build highways.

Carona’s bill was headed to speedy passage with no comment when Ogden remarked on the lack of fanfare for such an important measure. “It’s all part of my humble nature,” Carona replied.

Link to article here.

Bills filed to stop ‘double dipping’ on private toll roads
By David Tanner
Landline Magazine
April 27, 2009
U.S. senators have filed a pair of bills to stop private-sector toll operators from double dipping into the pockets of taxpayers.

The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association applauded the move, saying the bills filed by Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-NM, and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-IA, benefit highway users by eliminating subsidies for private toll roads.

“Taxpayers should never have been paying to provide these sweetheart benefits to the private sector to begin with,” OOIDA Director of Legislative Affairs Mike Joyce told Land Line.

“These two bills are a step in the right direction in protecting highway users from double – and even triple – taxation in deals that have gone down with the private sector.”

Bingaman and Grassley, both members of the Senate Finance Committee, introduced S884 and S885 to eliminate subsidies for privatized highways.

The first bill, S884, would stop states from receiving federal tax funding and private-sector money for the same toll road.

The other bill, S885, would put a limit on the toll operator’s current ability to write off the cost of the asset over the long term.

S885 would make it more difficult in the future for private investors to profit from subsidies, as happened with the privatization of the Chicago Skyway in Illinois. Private toll operator Cintra-Macquarie, a Spanish-Australian bank partnership, was allowed a 99-year tax write-off as part of the Skyway lease.

The Bingaman-Grassley legislation urges Congress to tighten up the tax write-off criteria.

“The tax code’s exceedingly generous cost-recovery provisions create a perverse incentive to tie up critical American infrastructure in private hands for generations to come,” Bingaman stated in a press release issued by both lawmakers.

“What we have is the tax tail wagging the dog, with dangerous consequences for America’s transportation policy. We must eliminate this perverse incentive and stop subsidizing these private highway operators – who are primarily Spanish and Australian banks – with American tax dollars.”

Grassley, the Senate Finance Committee’s top Republican, believes the bills will keep more taxpayer dollars in the Treasury for other projects.

“Our bills would protect taxpayers from the triple whammy of funding highway construction, giving generous tax breaks to private industry to maintain the infrastructure, and then paying tolls to use that infrastructure,” Grassley stated.

Both bills were sent to the Senate Finance Committee for review.

Joyce said a number of highway user groups are turning up in support of the bills.

“These are two extremely well-respected members of the Senate with a great knowledge in tax and financing issues. We applaud their actions on behalf of all truckers and all highway users,” Joyce said.

“We will fight side by side with them to see if we can get this language passed on its own or in the highway bill if need be.”

– By David Tanner, staff writer
david_tanner@landlinemag.com