Given the region's growth rate of a million people every seven years, a legislative moratorium on comprehensive development agreements would be catastrophic for the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Transportation projects immediately affected include:
Additionally, in the absence of anticipated concession payments, no funding source would be available for the billions of dollars in nontolled projects now scheduled for construction.
The Regional Transportation Council's Mobility 2030 Plan, adopted Jan. 11, includes about $16.8 billion of anticipated revenue from innovative funding strategies incorporating CDAs. If a moratorium is passed, the council would be forced to eliminate most of the new capacity in the 2030 plan. With construction costs skyrocketing at 10 to 12 percent annually, any delay would be devastating to our region.
No one agency, including the North Texas Tollway Authority, has the bonding capacity nor project delivery mechanisms in place to successfully deliver the number of projects that are needed to relieve congestion.
Carona runs afoul of anti-toll crowd
By Ben Wear | Thursday, March 22, 2007, 04:00 PM
State Sen. John Carona has learned in the last 24 hours how quickly a politician can go from champ to chump in the anti-tollroad blogasphere.
The Dallas Republican, chair of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee, has become something of a rock star in those circles for his direct — and surprisingly effective — challenge of what had become the new orthodoxy in Texas transportation circles. In the past few months Carona had described the Texas Department of Transportation and Texas Transportation Commission chairman Ric Williamson as “arrogant,” filed bills to rollback some of the agency’s toll road tools and held an all-day hearing March 1 where toll opponents got their best chance to fire back in the past four years.
And he signed on as co-sponsor of SB 1267 by state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, which would allow no more private toll road contracts with the state for two years. When more than 125 legislators signed on to the House and Senate versions of the bill, a seeming veto-proof majority, toll opponents saw a chance to deliver a crippling blow to Gov. Rick Perry and his Trans-Texas Corridor plan, if not to his whole toll road agenda.
Then Carona was quoted in this paper and the Dallas Morning News today indicating that, well, he didn’t plan to let SB 1267 come up for a vote in his committee. Tarrant County officials, at yet another Carona hearing Wednesday, had made it clear they don’t want a moratorium because it could delay for years some road projects they were counting on to get going.
People like David Stall, with anti-Trans-Texas Corridor group Corridor Watch, and Austin toll opponent Sal Costello went into action. Carona’s office was flooded with demands that he give the bill a vote, and some of his staffers said, well, he’d been misquoted.
No, Carona’s office, later said, the news stories got it right. But he issued a statement at mid-afternoon trying to put his position on SB 1267 in context.
“There are things we need to accomplish this session, such as stopping or reducing diversion of transportation revenues, and indexing the motor fuels taxes,” the Carona statement said. “If all we do is pass SB 1267, then we have told TxDOT it is okay to build all future roads as toll roads, just not (private) toll roads… . We have heard the public loud and clear about toll roads, public private partnerships, and the Trans Texas Corridor. We have also heard from Tarrant County and others for whom SB 1267 creates a hardship, and we have an obligation to listen to them as well.”
Trans-Texas Corridor PING!
Got that?
"Tax Increase" is what the man said, and let's not let him forget it!
First he sponsors a bill that looks great, but which he has no intention of ever letting come to an actual vote, and then he lets slip he really wants tax increases!
Firm Advises Cintra in First Privatization of Toll Road in Texas
Bracewell & Giuliani LLP advised Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A., a Spanish transportation company, in its successful bid to develop State Highway 121 into a toll road through Collin and Denton�counties. The award to Cintra, approved by the Texas Transportation Commission, is the first privatization of a Texas toll road.
Excerpt
flip/flop flip/flop.