Replies

State to seek corridor plans from 2 firms

Former partners are competing for the contract to develop segment of Trans-Texas project

By RAD SALLEE

Former business partners are now competing for one of the state's richest construction contracts — development of a transportation corridor between Northeast Texas and the Mexican border, passing near the Houston area.

The Texas Transportation Commission voted Thursday to seek proposals from the two for development of the route designated TTC-69, part of the state's ambitious Trans-Texas Corridor plan.

Projects envisioned for the corridor include a $12 billion toll road running west of U.S. 59, high-speed passenger and freight rail, pipelines and other utilities.

Spanish-owned construction giant Cintra and San Antonio road builder Zachry, which joined forces to win a contract to plan development of TTC-35 along Interstate 35, are competing against each other for the TTC-69 plum.

Combined forces

Joining forces with Zachry are ACS Infrastructure Development of Madrid, Spain; Williams Brothers Construction Co. and Dannenbaum Engineering, both of Houston; and six other team members.

Two other Houston firms, Othon and W.W. Webber LLC, are in the Cintra-led group.

"I find it fascinating that Cintra and Zachry have taken their experience on TTC-35 and each in essence has gone out and recruited and organized their own separate team," said Commissioner John W. Johnson of Houston.

"They are the most experienced in the state of Texas," he said. "The keener the competition, the better off we all are."

"I think you'll see more of that," said Phillip Russell, director of the Texas Department of Transportation turnpike division. "You're going to have cross-pollination."

At the same meeting, Texas Department of Transportation officials for the first time disclosed Cintra-Zachry's Master Development Plan for TTC-35.

Route undetermined

Despite its bulk — 1,600 pages — and the numerous maps included, the master plan does not include the actual route of TTC-35.

TxDOT says that will depend on the same federally required environmental process, including public hearings, as any other road project.

If all the hurdles are jumped, TxDOT says, construction could begin in 2011.

Because the master plan supersedes earlier "conceptual" development and financial plans that TxDOT declined to reveal in March 2005, these were released Thursday as well.

The Houston Chronicle and others had filed open-records requests to see the documents, and Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott agreed they should be released.

TxDOT and Cintra-Zachry then sued Abbott, asking an Austin court to exempt the plans from disclosure on grounds that they would reveal proprietary information, give competitors unfair advantage and have a "chilling effect" on future proposers' willingness to reveal their ideas.

The lawsuit was dismissed Thursday by agreement.

The campaign manager for gubernatorial candidate and state Comptroller Carol Keeton Strayhorn had urged that the plans be made public.

Strayhorn said Gov. Rick Perry had "fought to keep Texans in the dark and his contract with a foreign-owned company to build toll roads across Texas a secret."

Commission Chairman Ric Williamson said the matter was handled the same way as proprietary information from firms seeking other TxDOT work.

$175 billion proposal

Perry announced the corridor plan in 2002, calling for a $175 billion, 4,000-mile limited-access transportation network built mostly with private dollars for profit but owned by the state.

TTC-35 generally would run east of Interstate 35 from Oklahoma to Mexico and would include an $8.8 billion toll road from Oklahoma to San Antonio.

The proposal has received continual criticism, despite efforts by TxDOT to reassure the public.

Farmers and ranchers have expressed concern that their property would be divided or taken by eminent domain.

Some concerns

Local officials feared that the corridor would draw business away from existing routes.

Others were concerned that negotiating a 50-year contract for a project of such size was being done behind the scenes.

Supporters of the corridor concept say gasoline taxes will not be able to fund enough roads to meet future need, but private companies can build and operate them for a profit at no risk to taxpayers.

If a corridor developer defaults on its contract, Williamson said, TxDOT can buy the facility, probably for less than it cost to build, and bid it to another.

Corridor plans are released

Parts could be under construction in 5 years

A rail line looping around the west side of Fort Worth would be under construction no later than 2016, possibly accompanied by a half-circular toll road stretching from Alliance Airport to southwest Fort Worth and Mansfield, a Trans-Texas Corridor master plan unveiled Thursday shows.

The release of the long-awaited financial and development plan comes two years after the Texas Department of Transportation hired a private firm, Cintra Zachry, to alleviate traffic on Interstate 35 over the next 50 years.

For Tarrant County residents, the plan promises less congestion along Interstate 35W, as vehicles -- mainly trucks -- are lured to the Trans-Texas Corridor by speed limits of up to 85 mph and higher load limits. The combination of roads and rail line would form a skeletal structure for eventual development of the Alliance Airport area to the north, southwest Fort Worth and Johnson County to the south.

The 1,600-page document shows a rail line curving west of Fort Worth through Parker and Wise counties. Construction would begin between 2012 and 2016. A parallel toll road would follow sometime between 2017 and 2055.

But there's also the possibility that both the road and rail line could be built sooner and closer to Fort Worth, Cintra Zachry officials say. The private company has notified the Texas Department of Transportation that it would like to begin developing the area, possibly within five years, although a detailed study was not yet ready for the master plan.

The master plan shows a proposed connector road leading roughly from Texas 114 near Texas Motor Speedway to Farm Road 1187 in southwest Fort Worth to Texas 360 in Mansfield.

"It's a living document. We anticipate it will be updated, possibly a couple times per year," said Phil Russell, the Transportation Department's turnpike director.

Overall, the master plan shows the proposed toll road beginning at I-35 on the Oklahoma border, stretching around the east side of Dallas and then running roughly parallel to I-35 east of Waco, Austin and San Antonio.

The master plan offers a detailed analysis of the costs of building the Trans-Texas Corridor, plus detailed projections about how many motorists might use each segment of the 370-mile-long corridor, how much they might pay and how that money would pay for the roads over time.

Among the highlights:

Parts of the toll road -- 260 miles' worth -- would be under construction within five years and open by 2014.

Tolls would be about 15 cents a mile for cars, 59 cents for trucks. At that rate, a 145-mile, one-way trip from south of Mansfield to Austin would be $22 -- or for truckers, $85.

Initially, the roads would be two lanes in each direction, with cars and trucks sharing space. Eventually, the corridor would be expanded to feature two truck-only lanes and three car lanes in each direction. There would also be room for freight and passenger rail, and underground pipes for water, electricity, petroleum and other utility lines.

Total cost of designing and building the corridor would be $8.8 billion, up from previous estimates of $7.2 billion.

Private companies would pay that cost, plus fees totaling $1.9 billion, in exchange for the right to collect tolls for 50 years. The state Transportation Department would use the money on other work.

Railroad companies can't be forced to use new tracks, but more than half of all cargo would likely be diverted to the new corridor, according to Cintra Zachry estimates.

While it's considered a privately funded project, a third of the road 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 contract to build a portion of the corridor near Austin.

Otherwise, the state has no obligation to hire Cintra Zachry for any other work, but it could award the company part or all of the $8.8 billion project without putting it out to bid.

It's a new way of doing business. In the past, the Transportation Department awarded contracts to the low bidder. Now, a private firm is selected based on the "best value" for the state -- which can include price, but also factors such as ability to work quickly -- to manage the entire project.

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 has expressed interest all along in sharing the work load for other portions of the Trans-Texas Corridor with other private developers.

Cintra Zachry will also 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.

With the release of the master plan during Thursday's Texas Transportation Commission meeting, Transportation Department officials say they'll likely release financial documents soon that have been the subject of a freedom of information lawsuit filed by the Texas 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.

For more recent articles on the TTC (and there are more) check out:

Google

Dogpile

Trans-Texas Corridor PING!

The master plan shows a proposed connector road leading roughly from Texas 114 near Texas Motor Speedway to Farm Road 1187 in southwest Fort Worth to Texas 360 in Mansfield.

Puts my acrage right in the middle...hmmmm.

15 cents a mile? That's practically free! Only 15 bucks for a hundred miles.

</Sarcasm>

This does not even include the cost of your car nor the gas you put in it, which already has hefty road taxes.

It would be cheaper to fly, literally.

I'll be happy if they finish all the road construction in Austin by 2013.

bump

Very interesting! This is a debate that we really need to have in this country about where to go with the Intersate System and how to pay for it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower is always credited for creating the Interstate Highway system, and that is true, kind of. The system that Eisenhower envisioned was modeled directly on the German Autobahn system that the Nazis had begun building during WWII. As SAC, Ike got a first hand look at the system and how it helped the Third Reich move troops and supplies around efficiently.

The system in the US, as Ike wanted it, was meant to be able to evacuate American Citizens out of Cities that were prime targets for Soviet nuclear weapons. The original concept for the interstate system called for limited access, high speed roadways, not what we have today with complex interchanges, routes that go directly through the Downtown urban corridors of every major City in the Country, and speeds that slow to a crawl during all day rush hours.

It is also indisputable that new highway projects are horribly expensive, and planning on paying for new roads through tolls is a sound, realistic, and cost effective way to fund things like this.

It seems to me that a lot of traffic problems could be solved, if more locales could come together to fund major new projects that serve large areas. It makes sense to me to examine how to build a high speed, limited access, toll road from The Southern border near San Diego, all the way to the Canadian border in Washington. If you made at least part of it accessible only to high speed, 70 MPH+, Truck Traffic, and charged a fair toll at whatever the market would bear, we could cut the time required to ship goods by truck significantly, immediately reduce the thru-traffic of heavy trucks through urban corridors, and significantly unsnarling some major traffic nightmares. Truck traffic is not going away anytime soon. Nobody has figured out a better way to transport and deliver goods inside of urban areas, so it is prudent to plan for ways to better reduce the thru-traffic of heavy trucks. If you further reduce through traffic by routing thru-traffic away from those same urban areas, the situation during rush hour in places like the I-5 Columbia River crossing between Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA suddenly looks much different, and much more manageable.

As to Foreign investors wanting to underwrite the kind of project you describe, I really don't have a problem with that as long as everything is in accordance with our Laws. Anyone who is willing to shoulder that risk for a project like this, who is not the Federal governmnet, ought to at least get consideration. Let's face it, if they build infrastructure inside of the Continental United States, the sure can't pack it up and move it...

Good articles!

Could we see the Trans-Texas Corridor by 2013?,

Maybe Perry and his advocates of crony capitalism could let us see the contracts by then.

“You cannot draw that kind of conclusion from that document, because it has a disclaimer.”

"We reserve the right to screw you by raising the cost and taking more of your land" "Your Governor said We could"

The TCC will never be built. And damn sure won't be up and running by 13. They'll never work through the courts in time to do it.