Posted on 09/28/2006 7:01:16 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Edited on 09/29/2006 8:46:10 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
The Trans-Texas Corridor is now a little less mysterious.
A master plan of the proposed toll road and rail line from the Oklahoma border to San Antonio was unveiled this morning by the Texas Department of Transportation.
This summer, critics panned the secrecy of the privately funded deal and called for financial details to be revealed.
The plan is expected to be posted online later today — www.txdot.gov — but beware, it’s about 1,600 pages.
The document was prepared by Cintra-Zachry, hired two years ago to come up with a plan to move traffic, especially trucks, off Interstate 35 over 50 years. The path of the Trans-Texas Corridor would be roughly parallel to I-35.
Highlights of the plan released today:
Although it’s considered a privately funded project, a third of the construction and design costs - about $3.2 billion - would be in the form of federal transportation loans. The federal government would be repaid over 35 years, with interest.
The $3.2 billion would double the number of projects funded by Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loans since Congress created the program in 1998.
“It’s a loan program made possible by federal gas taxes paid by everyone in America, including citizens in Texas,” Texas Transportation Commission chairman Ric Williamson of Weatherford said. “Since Texans only get back 70 percent of federal transportation taxes ... we’d be remiss if we missed an opportunity to get that loan.”
Cintra-Zachry will keep a special relationship with the transportation department for years to come. The state paid the company $3.5 million for the master plan, and it awarded Cintra-Zachry a $1.4 billion portion of the corridor near Austin. Otherwise, the state has no obligation to hire Cintra-Zachry for any other work, but could award the company part or all of the entire $8.8 billion project without putting it out to bid.
Cintra-Zachry has already said it wants exclusive rights to build the rail line around Fort Worth, and the outer highway loop around Dallas-Fort Worth.
Even so, officials say, Cintra-Zachry all along expressed interest in sharing the work load for other portions of the Trans-Texas Corridor with other private developers.
Cintra-Zachry also will update the master plan, perhaps once or twice a year, for a yet-to-be-set fee.
“We wanted a long-term partner,” said Amadeo Saenz, the transportation department’s assistant director. “We wanted to minimize the state’s investment, maximize private sector investment and move at an accelerated pace.”
With the release of the master plan during Thursday’s Texas Transportation Commission meeting, transportation department officials say they’ll likely soon release financial documents that have been the subject of a freedom of information lawsuit filed by the attorney general’s office. The lawsuit calls for the transportation department and Cintra-Zachry to release financial and development details for the Trans-Texas Corridor.
Cintra-Zachry had argued that the information involved trade secrets, but the release of the master plan likely nullifies that argument.
Anti-Toll Roads Documentary Premieres In SA
Local protest planned against Trans-Texas Corridor
Work On Central Texas Phase Of Trans-Texas Corridor Could Begin By 2010
Plans for Trans-Texas Corridor had sparked lawsuit and provided fodder for Perry foes.
By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, September 28, 2006
State transportation officials say that, with the expected approval today of a master plan on the Trans-Texas Corridor's Interstate 35 twin, they can now release previously confidential documents that have sparked a lawsuit and played a prominent role in the governor's race.
The release of the documents, assuming they contain nothing explosive, will probably muffle charges from Gov. Rick Perry's gubernatorial opponents that he and his administration had a secret contract for the big toll road project. The agency, which posted the completed master plan on www.keeptexasmoving.org by noon, said the 253 pages of conceptual plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor likely will be released later today.
In addition, the agency and its development partner on the corridor alternative to I-35, the Spanish-American partnership Cintra-Zachry, will drop a lawsuit contesting an order to release the documents.
"We're as anxious to remove this from the table as anyone is," Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Ric Williamson said this week.
The Transportation Department and Cintra-Zachry, a Spanish-American partnership, in March 2005 signed a 104-page contract under which the agency would pay the partnership $3.5 million to prepare the master plan. The agreement also contemplated that Cintra-Zachry might build most of the roads and other facilities growing from such a plan. The agency immediately released that contract along with hundreds of pages of exhibits.
But it withheld two exhibits totaling 253 pages, a "conceptual development plan" and a "conceptual financial plan" for how the company might build what is now called TTC-35 and other facilities in the I-35 corridor. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, like Perry a Republican, on May 31, 2005, ruled that the Transportation Department should release the two exhibits because the contract had been signed and was thus final.
Disagreeing with Abbott's reasoning, Cintra-Zachry and the agency in June 2005 sued in District Court in Travis County to overturn his ruling. A trial in the case is set for Oct. 10.
In the meantime, Perry's three main challengers, in particular independent candidate Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn, have made hay with the confidential documents. Rumors flew about what might be in those 253 pages, the implication being that they contained some sort of political dynamite that Perry wanted to suppress until after the Nov. 7 elections.
Jason Stanford, a spokesman for Chris Bell, Perry's Democratic opponent, said putting out the documents will not change the candidate's opinion about the corridor deal.
"Even if it's not a secret deal, it's still a really horrible deal," Stanford said. "This is a titanic land grab that benefits a foreign company. I don't know what these documents could show that would make that worse."
Strayhorn's campaign at midday had not returned a call seeking comment on the impending release of the disputed documents.
The Transportation Department's position, Williamson said, has been that until the master plan was prepared to the agency's satisfaction, the chance existed that the agency could throw out the whole effort and start anew with another contractor. In that case, the information presented in those withheld exhibits would give other vendors a free and unfair gander at Cintra-Zachry's thinking, the department said.
With the approval today of the master plan by Michael Behrens,, executive director of the Transportation Department, the agency will consider the contract final and release all information, Behrens and Williamson said. When?
"We want to do it soon," Behrens said this week.
The 1,500-page plan, presented this morning to the commission, lays out which roads, railroads and utility facilities should be built in the next 50 years, including what they might cost, how Cintra-Zachry would pay for them and which projects should be built when. It also includes estimates of what the state might receive in concession fees from Cintra-Zachry if the company builds and operates those projects.
In the plan, Cintra-Zachry envisions spending $8.8 billion to build a four-lane toll road that would run 373 miles from I-35 at the Oklahoma border, circle east of Dallas, parallel I-35 from east of Hillsboro to Interstate 10 at Seguin, and then loop around the east and south sides of San Antonio to reconnect to I-35.
There would be two spots with no Cintra-Zachry roads: a segment of 50 miles or so from near Waxahachie to Hillsboro, where drivers would return to the current I-35, and the 49 miles of the Texas 130 toll road under construction by Lone Star Infrastructure.
For the right to build and operate the corridor roads for 50 years, setting maximum tolls under formulas to be approved by the Transportation Commission, Cintra-Zachry estimates that it would pay the state $1.96 billion in 2006 dollars. That could be in single upfront concession payments when contracts to build those roads are signed, or in a combination of upfront payments and sharing of tolls once the roads open.
In the plan, Cintra-Zachry assumes it would pay for the full 1,200-foot-wide right-of-way swath contemplated in the Trans-Texas Corridor plan, although the state would retain title to the land. The relatively modest expressway it would build in the beginning — the company believes it could start construction on all eight segments of the 373 miles by 2011 — would take only a few hundred feet to build, leaving the rest for railroads, more highway lanes and utility and pipeline easements.
Cintra-Zachry's contract with the state, however, guarantees the partnership first shot at only $400 million of the work on TTC-35, and the company has already called in that marker. The department has agreed to let Cintra-Zachry build the southernmost 40 miles of what is now called Texas 130, from Mustang Ridge southeast of Austin to Seguin. That road, which along with its northern 49 miles east of Austin likely will become a part of TTC-35 eventually, will cost $1.35 billion to construct and generate $270 million in 2006 revenue for the Transportation Department, according to the plan.
In the plan, Cintra-Zachry estimates that construction would start on the Hillsboro-to-Georgetown segments next, in 2010, with work on all eight areas beginning by May 2013 and all segments complete by 2017.
The master plan also contemplates construction over the next several decades of dozens of other connecting roads (most of them also toll roads), freight rail lines and high-speed rail lines.
The master plan, however, is only that: a several-volume how-to manual for attempting a massive infrastructure project unlike anything Texas or any state has ever done. It commits the state and Cintra-Zachry to very little, and even the $8.8 billion cost estimate and $1.96 billion concession fee numbers will inevitably be rendered inaccurate by time and circumstance.
"The master development plan is a living document," Transportation Department engineering director Amadeo Saenz said this week. "As things change, changes will have to be made to the master plan."
Trans-Texas Corridor PING!
The $3.2 billion would double the number of projects funded by Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loans since Congress created the program in 1998.
“It’s a loan program made possible by federal gas taxes paid by everyone in America, including citizens in Texas,” Texas Transportation Commission chairman Ric Williamson of Weatherford said. “Since Texans only get back 70 percent of federal transportation taxes ... we’d be remiss if we missed an opportunity to get that loan.”
PING!
Looks like we all get to pay for this thing if it defaults.
We pay gas taxes to fund new road construction, but they built new roads and then charge you for it again. The government is going to cease land and then sell it, keeping the profit.
The 7.2 billion, which is now 8.9 billion, will likely be 13 billion once it is done. No government project (save the WTC cleanup) has ever finished on time or under budget. It's also been so secretive and hush-hush. If not for the internet, we would never hear about it.
I think I'm going to vote for the Kinkster.
No government project (save the WTC cleanup) has ever finished on time or under budget.
I thought I remembered hearing that the Hoover Dam had actually been completed on time and under budget - if true, that makes one.
As for the rest of them ......pretty sad. I expect I won't be around to see the completion of this thing.
Part of the gang involved in the TTC, TransCore, wants to get legislation passed that requires a RFID be attached to every vehicle in Texas.
Railroad companies can’t be forced to use new tracks, but more than half of all cargo likely would be diverted to the new corridor, according to Cintra-Zachry.
The outlying freight rail corridor could help relieve congestion at Tower 55, a rail hub on the southeast edge of downtown Fort Worth where the north-south Burlington Northern Santa Fe and east-west Union Pacific tracks meet at grade to form one of the worst train choke points in the nation. ("At grade" means that the tracks intersect on the same level rather than one passing over the other.)The congestion at Tower 55 is akin to the nightmarish auto and truck gridlock that would occur if there were a traffic stoplight at Interstates 35W and 30 in downtown Fort Worth, said Mike Sims, a COG senior program manager for transportation.
"Most rail people say [Tower 55] is the busiest rail intersection at grade west of the Mississippi," Sims said.
""I think I'm going to vote for the Kinkster."
Not me....Grandma gets my vote. (Strayhorn) Perry is an empty suit pretty boy.
CUE SPOOKY MUSIC!
Perry is a Demorat from Haslet, Tx. Switched parties to WIN. Plenty of fraudulent land deals in his past. don't have any links, but known by any number of pols. in Tx. A$$holes in Tx lining their pockets in this. A pox on his house!!!
This plan extends the corridor to Kansas City, where there will be an international port and customs authority. From my understanding this highway will move uninspected containers north from Mexico to Kansas City, where they will finally be inspected by customs before dispersing across the country.
Terrorists could bring in a nuke to the heartland. Drugs will come in more quantity. Illegal Mexicans will flow unabated. This trans north America highway, also known in Missouri as the MexAmeri-Can highway is supposed to enhance NAFTA. This highway could spell a lot of trouble for sovergn America.
I think I'm going to vote for the Kinkster.
--
at least ya know what he's been smokin'. ;-)
Governor Rick is going to ride this corridor right out of office if he's not careful. He's definitely getting worried. Hit pieces on Friedman have started coming out.
"I think I'm going to vote for the Kinkster."
I'm doing the same thing. I can't tell the difference between our Texas "Republicans" and democrats.
Let Kinky stir it up for a few years, then hopefully some men with spines will start to run again for local government.
1. Perry is a Republican.
2. Perry is not from Haslet.
3. He "switched" after being recruited to do so by Karl Rove - and unseated Jim Hightower.
4. Before alledging fraud, you might want to line up some supporting documents.
"I don't care who wins (even Perry would be ok), as long as this toll road fiasco is ended."
The citizens of Texas voted overwhelmingly for tollroads in a constitutional amendment in 2001. I guess you don't much care about what the people want.
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