Corrupt Bargain in Houston Light Rail Contracts (FR Original Find)

4/23/04 | me

[GOPcapitalist]

FROM TODAY'S HOUSTON CHRONICLE

April 22, 2004, 11:55PM

Metro agrees to contract for next 4 light rail lines

By LUCAS WALL

Metro has taken a significant step toward the construction of Houston's next four light rail lines.

Directors on Thursday authorized signing a five-year contract estimated at $60 million with STV Inc. of New York, the same consortium that shepherded development of the Main Street line, which opened Jan. 1.

...

Six firms competed for the project, which includes options for two two-year extensions. Dennis Hough, the Metropolitan Transit Authority's director of contracts, said STV and its 16 subcontractors stood out as the most qualified companies to continue oversight of light rail construction in Houston.

NOW TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT REALLY HAPPENED:

TEXAS ETHICS COMMISSION
CONTRIBUTOR SEARCH
Please Click On the Report Number to View Reports

STV Incorporated, to Citizens For Public Transportation, $3,000.00 03-JAN-03 http://204.65.203.2/public/216570.pdf

Stv Incorporated, to Citizens For Public Transportation, $25,000.00 26-JUL-03 http://204.65.203.2/public/230485.pdf

NOTE: Citizens for Public Transportation was the pro-Metro Political Action Committee that ran the referendum campaign for the light rail expansion that STV just got.

[XBob]

don't forget the Metro sales tax in Houston, either 1 or 1.25 %, just for METRO.

[XBob]

It's pretty apparent that you don't drive, or get on an interstate or the PA turnpike.

At last count, here on I-10 (east west from Fla to Calif) here in Texas, every 3rd vehicle was an 18 wheeler truck.

Our warehouses are now the interstate highways, and everything is now 'just in time' delivery. Rail has a lower percentage of total shipments every year, except for massive quantities (eg coal and grain).

'Just in time' material control systems have pretty much sunk rail transit for anything other than large quantities and hazardous chemicals in large quantities.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

The basis of the figures is important to know. How much of the surrounding area counts as part of the system under discussion? In Los Angeles, there was both the city trolleys and the Pacific Electric. The PE alone was a 700 route mile system. Similarly, up in Boston, Bay State ran a 762 mile system while Boston Elevated ran a 229 mile system. Other systems into Boston had additional miles. Even little old Worcester, MA had a 251 mile system with Worcester Consolidated. In Philadelphia, you'd need to add up both the city trolley/subway - the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co. (a 548 mile system), the suburban trolleys - the Philadelphia Suburban Transit Co., the New Jersey suburban trolleys run by Public Service of NJ into Camden, the Philadelphia and Western, and the extensive commuter rail systems of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Reading Railroad. The latter alone were another 300+ route miles.

This is what I mean by saying 170 miles in Houston was small. Most large cities had city and suburban rail systems of around 1000+ miles of trolley, interurban, subway/el, and commuter rail.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

It's pretty apparent that you don't drive, or get on an interstate or the PA turnpike.

No, when I do drive, I use the PA Turnpike a lot.

Our warehouses are now the interstate highways, and everything is now 'just in time' delivery. Rail has a lower percentage of total shipments every year, except for massive quantities (eg coal and grain).

Uh huh.

Which would obviously explain rails market share rising from 37% to 42% of ton-miles during the past 10 years. Right? Also explains the ever increasing number of carloads and the ever increasing car weights (standard is now 115 tons - 286,000 lbs gross weight), and ever increasing number of trailer and container lifts.

This would also explain the massive warehousing boom that can be seen in the outlying areas of any major city or distribution center, usually near a nexus of an intermodal rail yard and a crossing of two or more interstates. Capitalists must be wasting their excess money by building large empty buildings to house fresh air.

You sure do know your stuff. Yep. No more warehousing, and trucks carry everything but bulk coal and grain.

'Just in time' material control systems have pretty much sunk rail transit for anything other than large quantities and hazardous chemicals in large quantities.

At Burlington Northern Santa Fe, for example, their largest source of revenue (and growing at 10-25% per year) is intermodal freight - individual trailers and containers on flat cars and well cars. Your explanation above surely explains their explosive growth correctly.

Your explanation also explains why the railroads make important "just-in-time" deliveries every day of parts to auto manufacturers, for example. Obviously an illusion, right? For example, the Chrysler plant in Newark, DE, is fed by its very own auto-parts train every day for larger items directly to the plant, and 60-70 roadrailers (over the road trailers that can be attached to a railroad truck for movement as a train) brought in from the midwest and south and trucked down 70 miles from Harrisburg (for now - they haven't built a terminal in Delaware yet, but may soon).

Other big areas for rail that you missed in your fixation on bulk farm/resource products - scrap and finished paper, finished lumber, perishables/meats, beer and malt liquors, finished steel, raw steel slabs, auto-parts, finished autos/trucks, finished farm/construction equipment, imported Asian goods, UPS/Schneider/JB Hunt/US Mail/etc. trailers carrying anything and everything - on and on we could go.

Are you even aware that the majority of trucking is movements under 200 miles? This counts more as local delivery than haulage of freight. Unless it is moving directly from a port to consignee, or is a short distance shipment from factory to consignee, freight is usually hauled by rail, and delivered by truck if the consignee is beyond the railhead.

You know why? Very few people want to spend a week on the road away from home, so cross country trucking is expensive.

In any case, this isn't some kind of war. Both modes work together to serve the needs of the nation. If either one suddenly vanished due to a strike or fuel shortage, it would be a national economic catastrophe.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Yeah, well he doesn't let the facts stand in the way of a good argument!

LMAO!

[Hermann the Cherusker]

YOU stated that no private highways exist, which is patently untrue.

Unless they pay Property Taxes, which I understand they do not (unlike Railroads, which pay $500 million per year in property taxes countrywide on an enterprise basis), they are not really private highways, but government highways financed and perhaps run by a private entity.

[XBob]

http://hazmat.dot.gov/pubtrain/app_g.pdf

1993 - hazardous waste shipments - 91% truck 9% rail

www.oecd.org/ech/pub/TRANSP2.PDF

share of US freight market -

Truck Rail
1960 68% 19%
1994 79% 8%

[XBob]

PS - also, Available road miles of rail have dropped by 50% since 1960.

[XBob]

61 - "Houston is not New York and New York is not Houston"

Boy, you got that right. Houston goes OUT, NYC goes UP. Mass transit in Houston is never going to be really practical. And almost NOTHING is within walking distance in Houston, once you get off of any mass transit.

Subways are impossible in Houston, they would have to be Submarines. Though aerial monorails, could work, there is no place near anything. Routine trips are 50 miles.

[cyborg]

Sounds to me like it would be tax payer money wasted in Texas then.

[XBob]

67 - LOL - "I remember many a time where a rail car didn't show up in time, the railroad had no idea where it was or how much longer it was going to take to arrive, the customer was running short on inventory, and we had to ship trucks on an emergency basis for them so they wouldn't have to shut down. We could ask for a double team of drivers and get a truck almost anywhere in the lower 48 in 2 days. I also recall customers calling to complain about why their truck was late, and the trucking companies always knew what the problem was and the exact location of their equipment. It would be broken down in the Rockies, or the driver had to stop and go the dentist for a toothache or some such deal. Man, am I glad I'm not having to deal with those annoyances anymore."

I spent years as an International Traffic Manager, building petro-chem plants, and boy are you right. And some of the stories of where my cargo was were really interesting. One of the best was a trucker who insisted he could make the ship in Los Angeles, on my heat exchanger from St. Louis. And I held the ship for him ($10,000 per day demurrage on the ship and $1 million per day penalty clause on the project. And he dicided to take 2 1/2 days in Colorado to 'visit' his girl friend. That was an expensive piece.

[GOPcapitalist]

Unless they pay Property Taxes, which I understand they do not

You did not even understand that they existed only two days ago, making it highly dubious that you have since gained an understanding of their tax circumstances. That said, I just looked up the tax status of the Leesburg Greenway, which pays property taxes on a formula based around its construction costs and will do so perpetually for the 40-year duration of its original project filing. So once again you are flat out wrong.

[GOPcapitalist]

The basis of the figures is important to know. How much of the surrounding area counts as part of the system under discussion?

Traditionally cities are measured as "metropolitan regions," which in Houston's case makes for the Houston-Galveston Metropolitan area. There's no strict geographic rule of thumb dictating exactly what is involved but generally speaking it includes the urban county plus the geographically continguous suburban counties, or at least their closest parts. When measuring Houston I'm counting the roughly 100 miles of downtown-area streetcar tracks plus another 70 miles of interphased electric railway tracks that served a shipping terminal to the east near the San Jacinto river and that served the region between Houston and Galveston, among others. Put another way, that which was used for regional trips not to exceed more than about an hour in duration. I am not, however, counting passenger railway between Houston and, say, San Antonio.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

1993 - hazardous waste shipments - 91% truck 9% rail

Probably a lot of short-haul truck moves. This is why statistics are typcially made using ton-miles, not just tons. In any case, Hazardous waste is a small and insignifcant part of the US freight market. Why bring it up? Why would rail haul much, say, hospital waste, or animal renderings?

share of US freight market -

Your statistics appear to be by revenue, not by freight actually hauled. Since rail is cheaper, it will certainly have lower revenue both absolutely and per ton and per ton-mile.

Again, what do you think you are prooving?

Also, aren't you familiar with any sources on the industry giving information that is not 10 years out of date? There are industry trade magazines online like Railway Age.

PS - also, Available road miles of rail have dropped by 50% since 1960.

Again, so? Most of that is consolidation of main lines and abandonment of branch lines. More tonnage is hauled today on fewer lines. Private Enterprise is busy at work making its physical plant more competitive and efficient. Comparing the system from 1960 to today and thinking something is proven by showing less mileage is like saying that since the Interstate System has less milage than the US Highway system it supplanted, therefore, roads must be in decline.

What is your point?

[GOPcapitalist]

METRO BOND REFERENDUM ( FOR 51.7% AGAINST 48.3% )

Out straining for gnats today, eh mac? Round up or down to you're heart's content. Go one way and you get 1%, go the other and you get 2%. Either way it's still a tiny margin of victory. In physical numbers the referendum passed by 8,963 votes in an electorate of 1.5 million. So just as I said - a turn of less than five thousand votes would have defeated the thing.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Okay, that's pretty much the basis of the other systems around say Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia etc. Since the areas were a bit larger then relatively speaking vs. Houston, the very longest trips might have been a bit over an hour. For example, the commuter line to Doylestown (county seat of adjacent Bucks County) from Philadelphia is about 35 miles long (it zigzags a bit, straightline distance is less), and takes around 75 minutes to travel on. I think the numbers I provided you are then pretty comparable to Houston. Can't say much for your Denver and other numbers though.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

The Dulles Greenway is a 14 mile extension of the Dulles Toll Toad. The Dulles Greenway runs from VA 28 at Dulles Airport to the US 15 Bypass just south of Leesburg, VA. The road carries the VA 267 designation. The Dulles Greenway was built by and is owned by a private corporation by the name of Toll Road Investors Partnership II (TRIP II). It was the first private toll road built in Virginia since 1816.

The Dulles Greenway opened on September 29, 1995. Although it is an excellent way to avoid traffic on VA 28 and VA 7 to Leesburg, it was not an instant hit. People did not want to pay the high tolls that the road had instituted. The initial toll on the Dulles Greenway was $1.75. The $1.75 was in addition to the tolls of about $1.00 from the Beltway to VA 28 on the existing Dulles Toll Road. This made a total toll of about $6.00 total round trip from Leesburg to The Capital Beltway. This was too much for some to pay. The result of the public's dislike of the high tolls was low traffic counts (approximately 10,500 vehicles a day on a prediction of 30,000 vehicles per day) when the Greenway opened. This resulted in revenue short falls for TRIP II, the owners of the Dulles Greenway. I remember hearing on the radio that VDOT and the State of Virginia were requesting scheduled payments for various expenses from the Greenway construction and the Greenway owners could not pay. Agreements were made that allowed the Dulles Greenway to continue operation and defer some of these payments. Another hot topic on the radio around the time that the road opened was whether or not the road would even survive. The argument was that people would not pay the high tolls to travel on the road.

http://www.roadstothefuture.com/roadsnova/267gw.html

Thank you for enlightening me though. I had heard of new toll road programs, but had not realized that a couple of the newer ones that had gotten off the groud were actual private enterprises. Hopefully we will see more of them, the privitization of most major expressways, and a reduction in the gas tax and state DOT bureaucracies and traffic congestion. I really don't understand why existing government toll roads are not sold as initial public offerings today.

If the network of privitized highways becomes large enough, they should be given policing powers like railways have and take that burden off the taxpayer as well, so the State Police (really a bad institution to begin with), can be drastically reduced in size.

I'd even like to see traffic laws privatized on the private highways (i.e. the company sets speed limits, time durations for use of the left lane, driving rules for trucks, weight limits, etc. not the nanny-government).

[mac_truck]

[Gopcap]"$27,000 from STV is enough to finance a piece of election mail to 25,000 households. On a vote that carried by less than half that amount a mass mailout of that size is substantial."

From the Oct 3rd Houston Chronicle

Ad blitz will precede Metro referendum; Anti-rail group plans to mount an aggressive campaign

---snip---

"We've bought the four major networks pretty heavy," Begala said. "We bought Jay Leno on Channel 2 and Nightline on Channel 13."

The group is drafting other anti-Metro rail ads, he said. "So far we are at about $178,000 ... including TV," a figure that only covers the first week. But more will be purchased, he said.

"It will be an aggressive well-funded campaign. People feel strongly about informing the public what a bad deal this is."

---snip---

The $27,000 that contractor STV gave to the pro-metro PAC was the equivalent of a single days worth of advertising spending the anti-metro PAC was making a month before the referendum was voted on. Its relative signifigance was very small in comparison to the well funded opposition.

I must say your intellectual dishonesty is on full display again, first with your depiction of this being a tight (1% margin) vote, and second with the specious accusation that the publically disclosed STV contribution to the pro-Metro PAC was instrumental to determining the outcome.

Rather than admit that your side lost decisively (52-48) after a well funded television ad campaign, you post up nonsense about a relatively minor player in the whole referendum. It makes me wonder what other niave ideas and uninformed opinions you might have.

[GOPcapitalist]

The PE alone was a 700 route mile system. Similarly, up in Boston, Bay State ran a 762 mile system while Boston Elevated ran a 229 mile system.

That seems to explain the discrepancy. My figure includes a narrow definition of basically the trolley provider and its two electric railway extensions. Your figure includes virtually anything and everything in the city and surrounding areas that operates a rail-based form of passenger travel. Look at the streetcars and their immediate attachments alone and you get comparable figures. But if you're gonna add in virtually every passenger railway extension from Santa Monica to the region west of San Bernardino (an 80+ mile trip) or from Boston to Springfield, MA (a 90+ mile trip) I might as well throw in rail-based passenger service between Houston and Beaumont (85 miles) as had been available since the 1850's, Houston and Columbus (73 miles) as had been available since the 1860's, Houston and Brenham (70 miles) as had been available since the 1860's, and a whole string of other similar railroad connections. If I do that and list every single railroad out of Houston to any and every podunk town in a 100 or 150 mile radius, then yeah - I suppose I could add up 500 or 1000 miles of "service" too. But keeping it defined to the trolleys and their immediate interphased extensions gives us 170 miles which is about the same for other cities in that era using a similar measure.

[GOPcapitalist]

The $27,000 that contractor STV gave to the pro-metro PAC was the equivalent of a single days worth of advertising spending the anti-metro PAC was making a month before the referendum was voted on.

One problem: the pro-metro PAC did NOT handle the majority of their side's broadcast advertising. That was funded by public tax revenues through Metro's "educational" advertising campaign. The pro-metro PAC mostly funded campaign literature, mail drops, yard signs, and that sort of stuff, in which case a $27,000 contribution is enough to send a high quality glossy mail piece to about 25,000 households.

Its relative signifigance was very small in comparison to the well funded opposition.

You're comparing apples to oranges. The "well funded opposition" you speak of had to singlehandedly counter both a taxfunded media blitz by Metro AND a political material and mass mail blitz by the Metro PAC that STV gave to.

I must say your intellectual dishonesty is on full display again, first with your depiction of this being a tight (1% margin) vote,

Since when did it become "intellectually dishonest" to describe a 1.67% victory as a narrow one percent win? Most reasonable and sane people call that ROUNDING. Would you rather me round up instead and call it a 2% margin? FINE! Metrorail passed with a narrow 2% margin! That still means down to the wire and its raw total of less than 9,000 votes means it could have gone the other way with even the slightest swing of the electorate.

and second with the specious accusation that the publically disclosed STV contribution to the pro-Metro PAC was instrumental to determining the outcome.

$27,000 funds mail to 25,000 voting households, which is what the Metro PAC did. If you doubt a carefully designed 25,000 household mail drop can impact the decision of 4,500 voters then you have no business analyzing political campaign scenarios.

Rather than admit that your side lost decisively (52-48)

"Lost decisively"? That sure isn't what the media reported the next day and has been reporting ever since...

"$ 7.5 billion Metro plan narrowly approved" - Houston Chronicle front page headline after election day

"METRO Narrowly Wins Light-Rail Proposition" - Channel 2 News website headline on election night

"By a narrow margin, voters resisted a multimillion-dollar campaign to reject rail expansion and approved Metro's ambitious $ 7.5 billion regional transit plan." - Houston Chronicle, 11/5/03

"Mayor Bill White tapped Wolff to oversee transit policy and the Metro Solutions expansion plan, which voters narrowly approved in November." - Houston Chronicle, 4/11/04

"Texans for True Mobility was scrambling to maintain an advertising campaign a day before the Nov. 4 referendum, which passed narrowly." - Houston Chronicle, 3/24/04

"In November, voters in Metro's service area narrowly approved a plan to expand bus service and extend light rail beyond the Main Street corridor." - Houston Chronicle, 3/21/04

"Wolff said the search firm will look for a leader who can implement the Metro Solutions expansion plan narrowly approved by voters in a contentious November referendum" - Houston Chronicle, 2/27/04

...and that's just a small sample. A lexis nexis search for the metro referendum pulled up over a dozen more articles in the Chronicle alone describing the victory as "narrow" or "narrowly" or "slim." It seems that you are the ONLY person who considers that (1 percent/2 percent) margin - have your pick and round either up or down cause they're both tiny - as "decisive."