Posted on 06/15/2017 3:58:05 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The rapidly escalating tollway fines that have left some Texans owing thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars could be a thing of the past, based on an amendment that surprisingly found its way into a Texas Department of Transportation bill this week.
But the impact to your pocketbook would depend on which tollway you’re driving.
Under the amendment, a car owner who has driven on a tollway without paying — even hundreds of times — would owe at most $73 in fines every six months, plus the unpaid tolls. But that change, proposed by Rep. Ina Minjarez, D-San Antonio, and approved by the House 136-3, would apply only to TxDOT tollways.
The agency owns just five tollways, including four in Central Texas: the northern stretch of Texas 130 from Georgetown to Mustang Ridge, Texas 45 North, Loop 1 north of Parmer Lane and Texas 45 Southeast. The fifth TxDOT turnpike, lightly used Texas 255 near Laredo, would see its tolls end under another amendment tacked on Tuesday to Senate Bill 312, the TxDOT “sunset” bill.
But Austin-area drivers could still, in theory, rack up larger fines on the 183-A, U.S. 290 East and Texas 71 tollways, operated by the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, as well as the MoPac Boulevard, U.S. 183 and Texas 45 Southwest tollways that are now under construction.
Mike Heiligenstein, the mobility authority’s executive director, said his agency’s policy from the beginning has been to work with customers judged to have innocently lost a bill or who might never have received one. But, Heiligenstein said, there are also many cases of parents who look the other way while their teenager blithely uses a tollway over and over without paying, and a cohort of adult “habitual offenders” . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at mystatesman.com ...
Lost a bill hundreds of times. Right.
Scofflaws.
Like those who are in this country illegally and then steal someone else’s identity and then wire their paycheck back HOME to Mexico to then illegally draw on US welfare.
TxDoT and DPS can’t work together to round some of those deadbeats up?
I bought a new car and drove it on a Dallas area tollway. by the time they sent me a bill I owed over $200 on a $1.75 toll. I paid. You can’t fight these people except with some reasonable penalty law!
This is just another sleezy Latino lawyer/legislator from San Antonio making it possible for his lawless Mexican constituents to drive on TX tollroads without paying. They don need no steenkeen TX/US laws…..
Make the roads PRIVATE and all our problems are solved.
(LOL - just trying to get in before the usual lobbyists get in)
Crazy Judge Judy in Williamson County wept.
I twice appealed a toll fine in CA (for two separate offenses on different roads) and succeeded in having each reduced to the toll plus a $10.00 service fee.
I refuse to live in an area with tollways. That is not America. Out here in West Texas we dont have em.
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