Jan. 27, 2008, 10:51PM
Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan is a hard sell
Officials pitch his proposed road network in packed, skeptical area meetings

By RAD SALLEE and ERIC HANSON
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

Gov. Rick Perry’s ambitious Trans-Texas Corridor plan, and his advocacy of toll funding for future roads, hit the skids in a skeptical Legislature last spring. The road shows no signs of getting any smoother as state transportation officials try to sell the plan to Houston-area audiences.

“This will wipe me out,” Dee Bond told a panel of corridor advocates at a town hall meeting in Rosenberg last week.

The panel, which included Texas Transportation Commissioner Ned Holmes of Houston and Steve Simmons, deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, was there to explain and gather comment on a segment of the planned Interstate 69/TTC through Fort Bend County.

“How is this in my best interest?” Bond asked, to a hearty round of applause.

“We don’t know where that roadway is going,” Simmons replied, adding, “We don’t know for sure if that roadway is going to be built.”

Diane Coan of Louise, in Wharton County, suggested the decision to build the corridor should be put to the public.

“Why don’t we just take a vote? Do we want this road or do we not want this road?” she said.

As proposed, I-69/TTC would run west of U.S. 59 from Texarkana to Corpus Christi, then split and head to the Mexico border at Brownsville and Laredo. Extensions would enter Houston from the north and west to serve the port and area industry.

As envisioned by Perry, the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor would be a network of these broad corridors linking major cities, with toll roads for cars and trucks, rail tracks for freight and passenger trains, and space for pipelines and power lines.

The most advanced of these projects, TTC-35, is projected to run from Oklahoma to Mexico east of Interstate 35, but no construction contracts have been signed for either TTC-35 or I-69/TTC.

Months of hearings to come

TxDOT has designated a consortium led by the Spanish company CINTRA as first in line for TTC-35 work. Two private developer teams are competing for I-69/TTC.At the Rosenberg meeting, another speaker asked if existing highways such as U.S. 59 simply could be widened instead of building the massive superhighway.

Simmons said it is difficult and costly to acquire right of way to expand highways that pass through numerous built-up areas.

“We can’t widen 59 without taking a good chunk of the town,” he said.

Earlier in the week, similar meetings in Hempstead and Huntsville were jammed with residents and local officials who questioned the need for the project and the motives of its supporters.

The town hall meetings will continue through the month and be followed by two months of formal public hearings on its Draft Environmental Impact Statement.

In Hempstead, corridor opponents reported a crowd of 800, filling the available parking space and the building, causing some residents to be turned away.

The Huntsville meeting drew such an audience that a second meeting is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Walker County Fairgrounds.

The Huntsville Item reported that more than 400 people attended the earlier meeting and that, for safety reasons, some 250 in an atrium could not enter.

At the Rosenberg meeting, which drew about 350 attendees, many wore anti-Trans-Texas Corridor stickers on their shirts or hats. The panel fielded questions from people who had filled out cards before the meeting.

A diverse coalition

Perry, TxDOT and the commissioners say that tolls are the only adequate way to fund most future road projects without increasing motor fuel taxes.Others say that increasing the tax and indexing it to the cost of road building could meet the state’s needs indefinitely.

Critics of the idea say that most of the state’s highway network is not congested except in cities and that road segments needing relief can be addressed individually.

The first parts to TTC-35 expected to be built are bypasses around Dallas and Austin, both growing urban areas where the interstate is congested.

Besides opponents of tolling, corridor plans have raised hackles with such disparate groups as farmers and ranchers who do not want their land divided, merchants who fear loss of business to new routes and others who oppose trucks from Mexico doing business in the United States, or the long-term leases of U.S. highways to foreign companies.

The House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said this today…

“The American people believe Washington is broken. Middle class families see the cost of living rising. They see more and more of their hard earned dollars being eaten up by college costs, health care costs, housing costs, food costs.”

“With all this happening in their daily lives, they’re watching the news — and they see politicians in Washington WASTING their money. While families are struggling to make ends meet, they look up and see politicians using taxpayer money to build monuments to themselves … funding hippie museums … letting entitlement spending spiral out of control. ”

The price of gasoline and threat of toll roads all over Texas (and the country) are part of what’s leading to a cumulative restlessness among the grassroots to throw the bums out. Let’s do it March 4 and then again in November.

Link to article here.

Proposal to build new I-35 bridge becomes entangled in toll road debate
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
By David Doerr
Tribune-Herald staff writer

Real-estate developer Rick Sheldon wowed Waco residents in November when he unveiled drawings of an iconic version of the Interstate 35 Brazos River bridge designed to look like the city’s landmark Suspension Bridge.

The new I-35 bridge would serve as a gateway for visitors passing through town and a point of pride for area residents. But after consulting Texas Department of Transportation officials on financing such a project in these lean times for highway expansion, it turns out there is only one way to do it: tolls.

The tolls, which proved to be a point of contention at Tuesday’s Waco City Council meeting, would be used to expand the highway from six to eight lanes between South Loop 340 and Elm Mott. The tolls would be charged only on the added two lanes.

Waco Metropolitan Planning Organization staff proposed the toll lanes in December to address area transportation needs while dealing with significant cuts in state and federal funding. Now it appears the toll lanes will be the linchpin in Sheldon’s effort to update the look of the I-35 bridge over the Brazos.

“There is still a chance that we could do it without the tolls, but it is going to take forever, and I don’t know if I will be real interested in working on it then,” he said. “I’m not going to do it in 10 years.”

Sheldon, a San Antonio native now living in Waco, has proposed developments totaling nearly $1 billion along Lake Brazos, including restaurants, housing, a new near-campus football stadium for Baylor University and a 250- to 300-room hotel. He doesn’t control all of the projects, but he is working to form a partnership to make them happen.

His bridge proposal garnered praise such as “breathtaking” from various civic leaders when it was unveiled. The toll lane proposal initially was met mostly with criticism and derision when it was announced.

But now the two projects are linked together and that could change people’s ideas about both. There won’t be a lot of time to debate their merits if the MPO’s policy board votes Tuesday to remove the toll provision from planning documents it must submit to the federal government in February.

So Sheldon is calling to extend the debate by keeping the toll proposal in the MPO’s plans. The decision whether to go ahead with the projects would be made at a later time.

“I think (the bridge proposal) starts the debate, and that is all I am asking for,” Sheldon said. “Let’s not have the debate for a week, let’s have it for a year. You can always vote to change it (later). All we’re saying is, let’s please don’t preclude this as an option because it really hurts our chances of getting this thing built.”

The rebuilt bridge would not actually be a suspension bridge, but would have beams and cables to suggest the same look, Sheldon said. The aesthetic enhancements would probably cost between $5 million and $10 million, he said.

Richard Skopik, the transportation department’s Waco region engineer, said the only way to finance reconstructing the bridge in the current transportation funding climate would be to add toll lanes. He said the transportation department isn’t planning to replace the nearly 50-year-old bridge unless the toll lane expansion project is approved.

“To add an aesthetic structure, as has been suggested, you could modify the existing bridge, but I think the intent and the vision was to have a brand new bridge that could encompass these concepts,” Skopik said.

However, he emphasized that bridge enhancements would not automatically come with the construction of toll lanes. Funding from other public or private sources would be needed to pay for the features that would make it look like a suspension bridge, he said.

Sheldon suggested that a private company could be found to operate the toll lanes and pay to make the enhancements. However, the Texas Legislature passed a moratorium on such public-private toll projects last year.

Skopik said the proposal is designed for the transportation department to manage tolling operations.

MPO director Chris Evilia has had to cut 13 out of 23 highway projects in McLennan County since transportation officials announced in late September there would be no money to add capacity to the state’s road system after this year.

State transportation officials have blamed the funding crisis on rising construction costs, federal cutbacks and state diversions of declining gas tax revenues.

Even with the deep cuts in the number of local transportation projects, Evilia still is about $11 million short to fund the remaining 10 projects on his list. The projects are designed to expand highway capacity to meet the state’s growing population.

MPO staff estimates tolls would provide up to 40 percent of the funding to expand the highway to eight lanes. Transportation officials indicate state coffers could pay the remaining 60 percent.

Tolls could also generate an additional $5.7 million to $10.9 million that could be used for other transportation projects in McLennan County, according to MPO planning documents.

Sheldon said the paradigm for funding roads in Texas is shifting whether people like it or not.

“For a lot of folks it is wishful thinking,” he said, referring to their aversion to toll projects. “They want things back to how it was in ‘Leave it to Beaver’ time. It ain’t that way anymore. Go look at the Legislature. They haven’t raised gasoline taxes since 1991. Every time it comes up, it’s a nonstarter.”

Frustration with the current transportation funding picture was evident during Tuesday’s Waco City Council meeting in which members were briefed on the issue and the toll road proposal.

Councilman Randy Riggs said it was “almost extortion” to have to choose between adding toll lanes to I-35 and losing funds for other projects in the Waco area. He blamed federal and state lawmakers for not taking action.

“(Expanding I-35) is something that our citizens need and deserve and it should be a state or a federal issue as opposed to a local issue,” Riggs said. “This is just wrong in my mind to say we will help you with your transportation issues if you do what your citizens don’t want done.”

Although most council members expressed frustration about being forced to consider the toll lanes, a majority appeared willing to recommend to the MPO’s policy board to keep the proposal in their planning documents.

City Manager Larry Groth suggested that keeping the toll proposal in the MPO’s plans would allow the transportation department to move ahead with surveying and preparation to expand the highway even if local officials decide against the toll lanes at a later time.

“If we approve this with the tolls in it, we can keep I-35 in the plan,” he said. “That means that the state can continue working on the design, layout and all that other stuff so there is not a delay, and in my mind that means we stay on this track we need to be on.”

Before Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Joe Mashek, MPO policy board chairman and a McLennan County commissioner, said he opposes the toll lanes even though Sheldon’s bridge enhancement project is linked to it.

“They are kind of holding a gun to our head saying ‘If you don’t do this, you aren’t going to get this,’ ” he said. “It’s a no-win situation because most people are against this toll road on I-35.”

Link to article here.

Fort Bend folks don’t care for Trans-Texas Corridor either
Friday, January 25, 2008
By Vicente Arenas / KHOU 11 News