Link to story here. I find it hypocritical that TxDOT claims it’s out of money yet creates two new high level jobs for pro-toll bureaucrats. Not only does TxDOT have misplaced priorities, it looks like a big pay-off for those willing to push toll roads on a public who doesn’t want a new toll tax to drive on what we’ve already paid for!

Local TxDOT official promoted to new job in Austin
01/08/2008
By Patrick Driscoll
Express-News

San Antonio’s toll road guru, David Casteel of the Texas Department of Transportation, is getting promoted to the agency’s Austin office.The 45-year-old Casteel, named director of TxDOT’s district office here in November 2003, will fill a newly created job as assistant director for district operations.

Starting Feb. 1, he’ll oversee TxDOT’s 25 district engineers.

“I want to make sure that our TxDOT districts have all of the resources we can provide them to work with local officials to solve local mobility problems,” TxDOT Director Amadeo Saenz said in a statement.

Another new position, called assistant director for innovative project development, will be handled by Phil Russell, who has been in charge of the Texas Turnpike Authority Division since 1998.

And Beaumont District Engineer John Barton will take over as assistant director for engineering, which Saenz vacated in September when he replaced Michael Behrens, who retired.

Casteel arrived in San Antonio just as the first studies for toll roads were wrapped up and Bexar County commissioners were seeking board members for their new Regional Mobility Authority to oversee tollways. Seven months later, he unveiled a startup toll plan for U.S. 281 and Loop 1604 that has since morphed through several variations.

Currently, more than 70 miles of toll roads are planned in San Antonio. Construction could start this year on an 8-mile tollway along U.S. 281 north of Loop 1604, with fees starting at 17 cents a mile in 2012 and rising with inflation.

Talk for years was that Casteel would move on to bigger and better roles within TxDOT. Such speculation didn’t wear down even after toll critics organized in 2005 and began turning up the heat on elected and appointed officials.

“If someone does a good job and they’re respected by everyone, there’s usually professional growth that follows,” Mobility Authority Chairman Bill Thornton said. “I view this as positive for David, and I view this as positive for us.”

Toll critic Terri Hall, founder of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom, said she wasn’t surprised either but questioned why TxDOT leaders would create two high-level positions when they’re running out of money to build new roads.

“I just think it highlights what’s wrong at TxDOT,” she said. “They’ve got a really bad case of misplaced priorities.”

Casteel, an engineer with bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&M University, joined TxDOT in 1983 as a summer hire in Graham. He worked in Bowie, College Station, Vernon and Big Spring and has been a district engineer since 1997, working in Childress, Corpus Christi and San Antonio.

Asked for his parting words for San Antonio, Casteel said the city should think big about its highways, freight rail and public transportation.

“We’re a big city, we’re going to be a big player in the state and national economy as years go by and we need to not let our transportation system go lagging,” he said.

Terri Hall-Walker Report’s “Political Person of the Year”

Links to articles here and here.

Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson will be remembered as the most stalwart Texas advocate of privatizing our public freeway system. What some called innovative and visionary, many called double taxation and highway robbery. Certainly, no one would have wished this would be the way Williamson would end his time on the Commission. Our hearts go out to his family.

Williamson was a lightning rod of controversy and known for his abrasive style and unretractable support for what’s known as public private partnerships (or PPPs). He relentlessly pushed the wholesale shift from gas tax funded freeways to a network of privatized tollways in the hands of foreign companies and unaccountable bureaucrats.

Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka summarizes the public sentiment this way in a Star-Telegram article:
In a column published in July, Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka described the blunt-spoken Mr. Williamson as “the most hated person in Texas, public enemy No. 1 to a million or more people,” having tried in vain to put the brakes on the frenzied dash to build privately run tollways.

Transportation Chairman Williamson dead at 55
By MATT CURRY
Associated Press
Dec. 31, 2007
DALLAS — Texas Transportation Commission Chairman and former longtime state lawmaker Ric Williamson died Sunday of an apparent heart attack, officials said. He was 55.

Williamson died at Weatherford Regional Medical Center just after 1 a.m., Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Chris Lippincott said.

“It is a great shock, everyone is very surprised to hear this news,” Lippincott told the Associated Press. “He certainly left his imprint on the commission and on the state with the vision he had for transportation.”

Gov. Rick Perry said Williamson was a longtime friend who will be greatly missed. The two were conservative Democratic colleagues in the Texas House during 1980s. Both later joined the GOP.

Williamson served in the Legislature for more than 20 years.

“Ric’s passion to serve his beloved state of Texas was unmatched and his determination to help our state meets its future challenges was unparalleled,” Perry said in a written statement. “He will be missed beyond words. Our thoughts and prayers are with the Williamson family during this very difficult time.”

Perry named Williamson to the transportation commission in 2001, and he became chairman in 2004. The five-member commission oversees the Texas Department of Transportation.

State lawmakers heavily criticized state transportation policy on toll roads and private contracts during this year’s legislative session.

The agency has traditionally been a pay-as-you-go organization, building roads with money collected from gas taxes and fees.

But under Perry and his appointees to the commission, notably Williamson, the agency has increasingly shifted to relying on toll roads and borrowed money to speed construction. The change has prompted intense criticism from the public and lawmakers.

Legislators from rural areas were concerned about private property rights. Those from urban districts complained of toll roads financed and owned by foreign companies.

“We were moving faster than most government agencies move and it spooked some people,” Williamson said in June.

TxDOT Executive Director Amadeo Saenz said Williamson was a visionary.

“As a member and chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, he brought passion and focus to meeting many of the challenges facing Texas today and for generations to come,” he said.

Williamson served in the Legislature from 1985-98, and was on key committees such as the House/Senate Budget Conference Committee, Appropriations (vice chairman) and Ways and Means.

He received a bachelor’s from the University of Texas at Austin in 1974 and went into the natural gas production business.

Survivors include his wife, Mary Ann; three daughters; and two grandchildren.

Services were pending.

____________________________________

RIC WILLIAMSON 1952-2007
Key figure on Texas transport issues dies
By JOHN MORITZ
Star-Telegram staff writer
December 31, 2007

Ric Williamson

• He stuck to his beliefs and willingly took heat for it
• View, sign the guest book for Mr. Williamson

AUSTIN — Ric Williamson, one of Gov. Rick Perry’s closest friends and advisers and his point man at the Texas Department of Transportation, died early Sunday of an apparent heart attack.

He was 55.

Mr. Williamson, a seven-term state lawmaker from Weatherford, had had two heart attacks since being appointed to oversee one of the state’s largest bureaucracies during a period of intense controversy and this year expressed concern that a third one might prove fatal. Still, his death at a hospital near his home in Weatherford sent shock waves through the Capitol communities that had been largely dormant during the holiday season.

“Anita and I are heartbroken at this sudden loss of a confidant, trusted advisor and close personal friend of ours for more than 20 years,” Perry said in a statement. “Ric’s passion to serve his beloved State of Texas was unmatched and his determination to help our state meets its future challenges was unparalleled.

“He will be missed beyond words.”

House Speaker Tom Craddick, who had served with Mr. Williamson during his career in the Legislature from 1985 until 1998, said, “He dedicated his life to public service, and I have fond memories of the time we served in the Legislature together.”

Political beginnings

Mr. Williamson, who in the private sector operated a natural gas company, was a conservative Democrat in 1984 when he first won a seat in the Texas House, representing a largely rural district west of Fort Worth anchored by Weatherford. He arrived at the House just before his 33rd birthday as Texas was reeling from a slump in the oil industry that strained the budget.

Along with other conservative Democrats and many of the then-outnumbered Republicans, Mr. Williamson pushed for steep cuts in state spending in an effort to hold the line on new taxes.

During that period he befriended Perry, another rookie lawmaker with similar West Texas roots and conservative Democratic leanings. Both would become Republicans as their careers advanced.

Perry was elected agriculture commissioner in 1990 and lieutenant governor in 1998. In December 2000, he ascended to the Governor’s Mansion as George W. Bush prepared to become president.

Within a few months of taking office, Perry named Mr. Williamson to the transportation commission and made him chairman in January 2004.

Ambitious plan

Leading the commission, Mr. Williamson became one of the chief crusaders for Perry’s ambitious Trans Texas Corridor, a system of toll and free roads intended to ease urban congestion.

The plan’s toll roads plan generated the most controversy, with critics denouncing the state’s contract with a Spanish company to build and operate the roads. Critics also said the plan would involve massive taking of private land.

During the 2007 legislative session, Mr. Williamson often butted heads with lawmakers who had expressed reservations over the pace of the toll road building plan.

State Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, who leads the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee, said in January that Mr. Williamson’s abrasive style was undermining his effectiveness.

Mr. Williamson, Carona was quoted as saying, “has worn out his welcome in many communities across the state. I think it would be in the best interests of the state that he step aside.”

Carona and Mr. Williamson would later mend fences, and in a statement the senator praised his one-time adversary.

“In over 20 years of service to Texas, during a time of conflict and sweeping change, Ric Williamson exemplified courage, commitment and dedication,” Carona said. “His ability to see far into the future, coupled with his command of process and the here-and-now, ensure his place in our history books when the story of 21st century Texas is told.”

In a column published in July, Texas Monthly‘s Paul Burka described the blunt-spoken Mr. Williamson as “the most hated person in Texas, public enemy No. 1 to a million or more people,” having tried in vain to put the brakes on the frenzied dash to build privately run tollways.

But Burka also described Mr. Williamson as a visionary who had “the most inventive mind that has passed through the Legislature” in modern history.

In the same column, Mr. Williamson told Burka that the strain of being in the Transportation Department hot seat was taking a toll. “Since I’ve started this,” he said, “I’ve had two heart attacks, and I’m trying to avoid the third one, which the doctors tell me will be fatal.”

Funeral arrangements were pending Sunday. Survivors include wife Mary Ann; daughters Melissa, Katherine and Sara; and two grandchildren.

Link to article here.

WOW! This honor goes to the PEOPLE of Texas and the tireless, indefatigable efforts of thousands of grassroots volunteers and supporters who have truly changed the face of Texas politics. Our Founders fought and died to assure in the U.S. Constitution that the power belongs to the PEOPLE, not special interests or even government. May 2008 be the year the PEOPLE determine the course of transportation in our City, State, and country!

HOW A HOME SCHOOLING MOM FROM CALIFORNIA TAUGHT
TEXANS A LESSON IN DEMOCRACY

by Jim Forsyth

It was not long after Terri Hall moved with her growing family from northern California to Spring Branch that she learned that badly needed expansions to US 281, which was to be the lifeline between her family’s new home and the restaurants, shops, and entertainment of San Antonio, would involve toll lanes. With a lifelong interest in public policy and a desire to get involved in her new community, Hall, an English major at UCLA, attended a couple of public meetings held by transportation planners and noticed something disturbing.
“We were talking,” Hall recalls. “But they weren’t listening.”

Three years after those fateful meetings, if toll road planners from Regional Mobility Authority Chairman Dr. Bill Thornton to Texas Department of Transportation Chairman Ric Williamson could get one do-over in life, it would undoubtedly be to pay more attention to the woman in row seven. Because while construction of new toll roads in Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth, even in usually contentious Austin, have been little more than photo-ops where men in suits can smile while holding golden shovels, in San Antonio it has turned into the first truly citizen driven open discussion about the proper role of government and the future for quality of life issues in this region since the Applewhite Reservoir debates of the mid 1990’s. And for forming, molding, and leading the most effective grass roots organization since Ernie Cortez was exchanging pennies at Frost Bank in 1975, Terri Hall is the 2007 San Antonian of the Year.

In a wide open, amazingly disparate place with absolutely no viable public transportation, the builders of highways have wielded enormous power in Texas since the start of the last century, a power over the life or death of local economies not seen since the heyday of the railroad. When the decision was made by the Texas Department of Transportation shortly after Rick Perry became governor in 2000 to pursue the toll option for quick expansion of highways to serve a rapidly booming population, the decision was also made to use a different approach to promote a concept which was relatively new to Texas. Rather than the previous procedure of centrally planned highway projects coordinated from Austin, the department used the Vito Corelone touch. Putting their arm around local economic development leaders who have long been accustomed to puckering up before TexDOT, they spelled out two visions of the future. You don’t want the Toyota plant to be at the end of a gravel road, do you? How about all those new jobs at Ft. Sam, that won’t work without new highways, will it? Now, the Don needs a favor. Shown the harbor and the cement overshoes, local leaders, not TexDOT, became the public face of ambitious toll projects, and shadowy groups like the RMA and the Metropolitan Planning Organization, filled not by publicly elected officials but with paid employees and placeholders, even with employees of TexDOT itself, suddenly took the reins of multi billion dollar construction projects. The argument became not one of the viability of toll roads and the ethics of double taxation, but one of local control, the same powerful siren song of Texas populism which has enabled the clumsy and wasteful system of allowing 18 separate school districts to exist in Bexar County to survive unchallenged for so long. “If we don’t do this ourselves,” came the argument made to local people by local officials, “we will surrender our control and state officials will do this to us and the profits and the decision making will leave the local area.”

But TexDOT was playing a double game. While the local toll road boosters. men and women putting their credibility on the line on behalf of the toll road dream, were telling anybody who would listen, for example, that existing roads will never be tolled, 1200 WOAI news broke what may have been one of the major news stories of the year, that TexDOT in fact had circulated to members of Congress a secret plan to buy back existing highways so they could be tolled.

TexDOT and local toll supporters were suddenly on the defensive, and all this played directly into Hall’s hands. Smart, telegenic, with a devout and heart-felt Christian faith which helped reassure and galvanize south Texans, and amazingly slim after giving birth to her sixth child in January, the 38 year old rookie activist was able to quickly seize control of the debate, leaving TexDOT flat footed and allowing her anti toll organizations, the San Antonio Toll Party and Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom to move from those early days when they were ignored by toll road planners, to being ridiculed, to being truly feared as a force which actually could derail the state’s carefully crafted transportation vision. At the MPO toll road vote earlier this month, toll road planners spent more time refuting TURF’s arguments than forwarding their own.

So many speakers blasted Governor Perry’s ambitious Trans Texas Corridor project during a series of public hearings across the state that Perry was reduced to making the bizarre comment, in an interview with 1200 WOAI news, that the public hearings were really not about gaining public input, but were actually ‘to see if anybody had any better ideas, and I didn’t hear any.’ Both the Republican and Democratic parties have approved resolutions opposing toll roads, and San Antonio’s anti toll fight has been used as a model for other populist groups statewide and around the country.

But despite all this, the toll road juggernaut rolls on. The MPO this month approved the construction of $1.3 billion in toll lanes on US 281 and Loop 1604 over the coming decade, and officials hope to begin construction in the spring. Hall’s group has had mixed results in its efforts to unseat pro toll members of the legislature, and many key decision makers, like Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, continue to ridicule the anti toll group’s efforts.
It remains to be seen whether Hall can keep the toll road builders honest over the long run, and whether she can channel the passion she has brought to the anti toll effort into other populist causes, which is frequently the ruin of citizen action groups. She’ll also have to avoid the tendency to fall prey to black helicopter conspiracy theories, like the bizarre claim that the Trans Texas Corridor is really part of a sinister plot to combine Mexico, the U.S. and Canada into a single nation. But Hall has in very many ways written the new guidelines for effective bottom up community and political organization in the 21st Century: Seize the issue, attack it with a clear and simple message repeated over and over again, understand the media and know how to create a story, and appeal to a populist agenda. Whether you’re selling soap or opposing a toll road, that is a pretty effective battle plan.