Free Republic

Two years ago, lawmakers went to war with Gov. Rick Perry over his push to privatize Texas toll roads, but their efforts to stop the idea largely failed. As they return Tuesday to launch the 2009 legislative session, lawmakers will be faced with a choice of either raising taxes – which both Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst have called a bad idea – or giving private companies a greater role in paying for, and operating, a fast-expanding network of toll roads. The two-year moratorium on private road deals that passed in 2007 slowed but didn't kill Perry's plan to...

Taylor used to be a player in Williamson County, with it and Georgetown vying for funds and the attention of passers-through. But no more, and despite what many city officials will tell you, it will not be a player unless something is done to counteract the rapid growth of surrounding communities. What needs to be done is, Taylor needs to forget its past and embrace something residents see as so vile, that when I first arrived here I thought its mere mention was a dirty word. I am speaking of Rick Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor. The Texas Department of Transportation (another...

A retreat from the Texas Department of Transportation's plan to build a new multi-lane toll road through East Texas is a clear victory for Angelina County and Diboll, local officials said last week. "I'm glad they went back to the original plan," Diboll Mayor Bill Brown said. Instead of a new Trans-Texas Corridor toll road paralleling U.S. 59, Tx- DOT now plans to widen 59 with a new bypass around Diboll and Lufkin. The planned 59 bypass, needed to avoid the signalized intersections in Diboll and Lufkin, provides in the original plan four exits for Diboll. That will be good...

Non-compete clauses for tollways would be a non-starter under a policy the Texas Transportation Commission will consider Thursday. Such language in toll road contracts, which generally prohibit a toll road owner (such as the Texas Department of Transportation) from building or expanding a nearby free road, or require compensation for doing so, have been controversial in Texas and elsewhere. TxDOT’s contract with Cintra-Zachry, a Spanish and American consortium that will build and operate a southern section of Texas 130, requires TxDOT to pay up if it makes certain highway improvements within 10 miles of the road. The commission Thursday will...

Earth Tech Inc. has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract to provide environmental services to Central Texas Highway Constructors, LLC (CTxHC). Earth Tech, the lead planning and engineering firm for Cintra Zachry, LP on the Trans-Texas Corridor 35 (TTC-35) project, was approved by CTxHC for environmental work on Segments 5 and 6 of the SH 130 highway project. The SH 130 project is the first facility to be developed under the TTC-35 Comprehensive Development Agreement. An integral part of the preparation for highway construction, the project includes site assessments, hazardous materials clean-ups, remediation, and other environmental services. A private-public partnership,...

SH 130 Concession Company LLC finalized the legal details of a financial close with Texas DOT on a $1,360m toll concession to build SH130 segments 5&6 Thursday and Friday last week in bankers' offices in New York City - at Orrick, 666 Fifth Avenue. The actual money flows should occur on Thursday or Friday (Mar 13 or 14) this week, Jose Maria Lopez de Fuentes, president of Cintra North America, told us this morning. Hundreds of documents and over 20 lawyers were involved last week representing TxDOT, private equity people, banks, mostly European, the TIFIA loan group from FHWA, and...

Officials with the Spanish toll road operator Cintra have announced that the company has secured $430 million in loans from the U.S. government to build and operate two segments of a toll road in central Texas. Cintra officials announced the company’s financial plan for the $1.36 billion Highway 130 segments on Monday, March 10. OOIDA Senior Government Affairs Representative Mike Joyce told Land Line that the Association does raise red flags when federal dollars are used to subsidize private investors. Officials with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association are not, however, categorically opposed to a state using future toll revenue to...

REFUGIO, Texas - With an abandoned Wild West-vintage town of storefronts slumbering just a block from old US 77, tiny Refugio is a place where myth and reality coexist in a ghostly silence. more stories like this Obama faces heat over aide's NAFTA remarks to Canadians Texas, Ohio could decide Dem nomination Canada says didn't misrepresent Obama over NAFTA McCain tags Dems on trade treaty NAFTA seen differently in Ohio, Texas And now this South Texas outpost is swept up in one of the more intriguing tests of myth vs. reality in today's political life: the battle over the so-called...

Ever wish you weren't right? In 1997, the notion of selling off publicly owned infrastructure to private sector operators was coming into its own. After the city hired a consultant to determine the value of the publicly owned CPS Energy, it raised red flags. CPS consistently charges some of Texas' lowest utility rates while providing a significant chunk of the city's revenue, I argued. Profit motives can produce wondrous results. But uncontrolled, they can also produce costly disasters. Some things — especially those that efficiently deliver services that are essential — are best kept in the public sector to assure...

STAPLES — Dennis Elam knew he wasn’t cut out to be a city dweller during the one month he lived in San Marcos with his new wife, Brenda, after they were married in 1963. “I’ve got to have my horse. They won’t let me keep him in an apartment,” Elam said. The problem for Elam and his family is that the State Highway 130 construction contractor and the property acquisition firm has tapped the 57 acres they live and work cattle on and it is smack in the middle of the path of the highway where it will connect with...

Three private groups are now in the hunt to build U.S. 281 toll lanes, but two big foreign companies competing just a short while ago to build and lease a larger toll network here have dropped out. The Alamo Regional Mobility Authority board voted Wednesday to let all three teams submit plans to rebuild U.S. 281 north of Loop 1604 into a tollway with free access roads by 2012. It's the fledging agency's first project. "Goodness knows we have been two and a half years getting here," board member Bob Thompson said. "Maybe it's even more important to see the...

Toll road contract in Texas allows state to lower speed limits on nearby interstate freeway to avoid paying penalties to a private company. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) has agreed to consider lowering the maximum speed limit on a stretch of interstate highway that competes with a planned toll road. Cintra-Zachary, a joint Spanish-US venture, paid TxDOT $1.3 billion for the right to collect tolls on 40-miles of State Highway 130 set for construction beginning in 2009. Although TxDOT suggested that free market competition was part of the goal of using a public-private partnerships to construct and operate roads,...

Cameras tucked into orange barrels videotaped the license plates of thousands of drivers on Interstate 35 as part of a Texas Department of Transportation study of the busy highway, officials said. The 21 camera points scattered along the I-35 corridor between Dallas and Mexico included two in Central Texas, one north of Round Rock and the other in Kyle. The cameras caught both north- and southbound cars, agency spokeswoman Gaby Garcia said. Critics of last month's study questioned whether it invaded motorists' privacy. But Garcia said the study and others planned for the future are vital to transportation planning and...

The Texas Department of Transportation is installing traffic signals designed to increase congestion and drive toll road traffic. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is using traffic signals to create the level of frustration to a point where the public is forced to accept toll roads. Earlier this month in Austin, TxDOT added an extra traffic signal on State Highway 71 to coincide with the opening of the third segment of the State Highway 130 toll road. Residents interviewed by News 8 Austin complained that the change made already bad traffic much worse on nearby free roads. "At its worst...

...[The building of the Trans-Texas Corridor] is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon... Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen...

Texas needs the Trans-Texas Corridor because of its surging population, a representative for Gov. Rick Perry said Tuesday while speaking in Cleburne. Plans are to build the multi-lane highway and rail system parallel to Interstate 35, north-south through the center of the state. Kris Heckmann, deputy director of Perry’s Legislative Division spoke at the Cleburne Civic Center at the invitation of the Johnson County Republican Women for their monthly meeting. Every decade since World War II, Texas’ population has increased by at least 20 percent, Heckmann said. In 1990, the state’s population was 16.5 million, and today the population is...

House, Senate passage seem likely The careening vehicle that has been this legislative session's toll road overhaul appeared to pull into the garage about 4:35 p.m. Thursday. At that moment, Republican state Sen. Robert Nichols of Jacksonville, after spending several moments huddling on the floor with Sen. Tommy Williams, sponsor of Senate Bill 792, affixed his signature to a compromise version of the bill, and the two shook hands. "We've got a deal now," Williams, R-The Woodlands, said about an hour later. "This is really going to move transportation issues forward, particularly in large metropolitan areas." The deal was among...

AUSTIN — Gov. Rick Perry doesn't like a transportation bill Texas lawmakers sent him and threatened Wednesday to call them back to address the issue if no solution is reached before the legislative session ends May 28. "The good news is, there's still time to fix it .... if not, I have no other option as the leader of this state than to bring the Legislature back until we address these issues and we get Texas back to where it can have a vibrant transportation infrastructure," Perry said. Though a two-year moratorium on private toll road contracts is a major...

AUSTIN -- The Texas Senate passed its second bill this session creating a two-year moratorium on privately funded toll roads Friday, a sharp rebuke of Gov. Rick Perry's plan to solve the state's transportation problems. Senators voted 27-4 to approve the bill, which would prevent the creation of toll roads made by public entities contracting with private companies. The Senate passed a similar bill earlier, but that version appears dead in the House. The version approved Friday easily passed the House this month by a vote of 137-2. The bill's Senate sponsor, Republican Tommy Williams of The Woodlands, said he...

Wonder why there is all the fuss over toll roads? Well, we're not talking about traditional toll projects. Gov. Rick Perry and his Transportation Commission are pushing private toll road deals that limit free routes and allow the private operator to charge high tolls. As ex-Transportation Commissioner Sen. Robert Nichols, a stickler for details and the author of a bill to halt comprehensive development agreements, or CDAs, has noted, the devil is in the details. These private toll contracts include noncompete agreements like Cintra's. There will be no improvements made to existing roads or new free routes built within a...

Texas’ largest farm organization is once again describing the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) as a disaster for farming and ranching operations that lie in the potential path of the TTC and a major mistake for Texas itself. The Texas Farm Bureau is also discovering that there are many allies in opposing the massive highway project, some of them members of the Texas Legislature. “Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans Texas Corridor,” says TFB President Kenneth Dierschke, a grain and cotton farmer from San Angelo. “There’s never been any doubt that the impact on agriculture would be negative, but...

? 2007 WorldNetDaily.com Texas farmers are stepping up their opposition to the Trans-Texas Corridor, a massive highway project that ultimately could take about half a million acres of the state out of agricultural production ? and according to opponents possibly hasten the advent of a North American Union. "Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans-Texas Corridor," said Farm Bureau President Kenneth Dierschke, a grain and cotton farmer from San Angelo. "There's never been any doubt that the impact on agriculture would be negative, but now we see a growing number of people who believe the TTC would be bad...

Mike Krusee looked tired. The Republican state representative from Williamson County, interviewed at his Capitol office last week, for 10 days or so had been fighting what some people call the creeping crud, a debilitating mixture of cold, flu and allergy symptoms hitting many Central Texans this spring. But Krusee, for much longer than 10 days, has also been fighting the creeping realization among legislators that over the past two sessions, they might have granted Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Department of Transportation too much power to create toll roads. For the first time in his three sessions as...

The conventional wisdom among conservatives about the benefits of privatizing government programs is being severely tested in a heretofore largely obscure controversy that is now blossoming in America’s heartland. When up to several thousand people gathered in vigorous protest March 2 at the majestic state capitol in Austin, there were echoes of the formative beginnings of similar grassroots protest movements of other eras, in which the organizers were not professional political activists, but rather genuinely fed-up ordinary citizens motivated by a combination of self-interest and patriotism to seek a legitimate redress of grievances. Almost 30 years ago, a similar citizen...

With a major interstate running right through our area traffic is a common topic for Central Texans. How do we solve the problem of more traffic on i-35? Is the Trans Texas Corridor a realistic solution and do we even need it? In part two of our Trans Texas Corridor series we look at the project from a needs angle. There are basically two sides to the Trans Texas Corridor project, those for it and those against. One thing both sides gree on is that something needs to be done. There are twenty one million Texas residents. 45 percent of...

Every day I can look out the window of my office in downtown Austin and watch traffic creep along Interstate 35, half a mile away. The time of day doesn’t seem to matter, nor does the weather: morning or evening, wet or dry, the snarl persists. Part of this is due to the unwieldy design of the downtown exit and entrance ramps, but the main reason is the volume of traffic, much of it commercial. I dread the drive to Dallas, which I last made on the Friday afternoon before the Texas-Oklahoma football game – surely the worst day of...

Ric Williamson, a former state legislator and longtime pal of Gov. Rick Perry, runs the monthly meetings of the Texas Transportation Commission like a traffic cop. Staff members give brisk status reports before Williamson dismisses them so the next bureaucrat can take the podium. If members of the public embark on a diatribe, Williamson will let them prattle on with an air of friendly indulgence. Then, rounding his shoulders and leaning forward—using body language no doubt perfected when he and Perry were freshmen state representatives harrying their elders—he’ll pleasantly announce that their time is up. As commission chairman, Williamson sits...

The continuing political parlor game of "What price tolls?" took an interesting turn Nov. 7. The Big Toller himself — Gov. Rick Perry — seemed to suffer little damage from what was a sustained battering on the issue, losing only three of the dozens of counties in the paths of the two proposed Trans-Texas Corridor routes. But voters in Texas House District 52 alongside the new Texas 45 North tollway put something of a scare into state Rep. Mike Krusee. The Williamson County Republican is the chairman of the House Transportation Committee, stage-managed the birth of the controversial Phase 2...

(October 30, 2006)—The multi-billion-dollar Trans Texas Corridor will pump billions of dollars into the state’s economy and will create millions of jobs according to a new study by Waco-based economist Ray Perryman. Click Here To Read The Full Report In “Moving Into Prosperity: The Potential Impact of the Trans-Texas Corridor on Business Activity in Texas,” Perryman says the project will make the state’s economy more competitive. “Because the TTC enhances efficiency, improves logistics, and reduces transportation time and costs, it increases the ability of companies within the region to expand intrastate trade and operations, and, thus, increase market size and...

When a close call like last week's train derailment in Beacon Hill happens, the "what if" questions — as in what if a deadly poison had been released near so many homes — soon are followed by questions about what can be done. But answers to how long it will take to reroute most trains out of San Antonio's core, how much it will cost and where the money will come from don't come easily. And the best guesses on fixing the problem — a decade or more and billions of dollars — don't help people sleep much better. "It's...

Texas Democratic Party Chairman Boyd Richie on Tuesday called for an attorney general's investigation of what he said was the use of inside information on purchases of land near the proposed route of the Trans-Texas Corridor. Richie attempted to draw a linkage between a company investing in land, one of its owners (former Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Williamson) and GOP Gov. Rick Perry. "Inside information," in this case, could mean articles in the newspaper. The company's 2005 filing with federal regulators cited by Richie says the company, Wilson Holdings Inc., will focus on buying land "around the Central Texas region's...

The Texas Transportation Commission unrolled Sept. 28 the long-awaited road map for the Trans-Texas Corridor. Release of the Master Development Plan will result also in public disclosure of the full contract between the state and Cintra-Zachry, a private joint venture between the Spanish firm Cintra and the Texas highway contractor Zachry. Both Cintra-Zachry and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) appealed a ruling from the Texas Attorney General’s office that the full contract is an open record. A trial was scheduled for Oct. 10 in Travis County district court. The master plan calls for the prompt building of seven segments...

<p>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.</p> <p>This summer, critics panned the secrecy of the privately funded deal and called for financial details to be revealed.</p>

Flanked by Dallas County and state officials, Gov. Rick Perry led a bipartisan pep rally Wednesday for the $7 billion Trans-Texas Corridor, his sprawling transportation project that has drawn criticism from several quarters. Perry announced that the private sector has offered to build the southern sector of Loop 9 as a toll road. The proposed outer loop around the Dallas metropolitan area has been under study for decades and could eventually tie in with the corridor project. Cintra-Zachry, a U.S.-Spanish consortium proposing to build the first segments of the corridor, has notified the Texas Department of Transportation that the company...

Governor Perry, Conservative and Good for Texas I’m writing this especially for my friends here at FR. I’ve been reading a lot of back and forth about our Governor on here lately. There seem to be a group of folks that don’t like him or at best barely tolerate him. It’s America and that’s the American way. Lord knows, Freepers don’t have a problem expressing their opinions. It just surprises me considering the conservative foundation of this web site. I’m a working class conservative, like so many others on here. I don’t have deep rooted political ties to the administration,...

Grupo Ferrovial, Spain’s construction, infrastructure and services giant, had a busy summer acquiring airports in the UK and Peru. Now it has a concession to build and operate a Texas superhighway. Construction of the new toll road project, designed to develop an alternative route to Interstate 35 as part of the planned Trans-Texas Corridor is due to start early next year. This is has been agreed by the Texas Department of Transport under a comprehensive development deal with the Spanish company Cintra - Concesiones de Infrastructuras de Transporte, a member of the Ferrovial group. Cintra’s partner for the five-year road...

AUSTIN - A proposed toll road that would encircle Dallas-Fort Worth has a new nickname: the Doughnut. Texas Transportation Commission members passed out Krispy Kreme doughnuts Thursday to symbolize their support for the outer loop, which would be built in segments from 2011 to 2030 as part of the Trans-Texas Corridor. They also celebrated the commission's approval Thursday of a new road-building partnership among Metroplex cities and counties, the North Texas Tollway Authority and the state. The partnership would also work with any companies wishing to build private toll roads in the area. "We are committed to the Doughnut," commission...

Governor emphasis on tollways, private road-builders has generated urban and rural unrest Rick Perry's political problem with transportation, to the extent that he has one, may be that he's trying to douse a fire in 2006 that won't ignite for another 10 to 20 years. His critics say, no, the problem is that Perry wants to charge us for the water. What isn't in dispute is that the Republican governor and his appointees over the past six years have turned Texas transportation on its head, moving the state from financing public roads solely with taxes to a system that would...

DENTON - "Grandma" lost her argument for a contrived ballot nickname. But Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn of Austin might have found a plank on which to build a campaign against Gov. Rick Perry. It's a plank 600 miles long and a quarter-mile wide. It's a giant, privately owned, multilane tollway that would part the Texas countryside the way the governor parts his ample hair. Strayhorn, a Republican running as an independent candidate, has criticized the Trans-Texas Corridor tollway plan loudly for months. So have the other principal challengers in this traffic jam of a race, novelist Kinky Friedman of Medina...

“Texans have a problem,” State Representative Larry Phillips said about the current statewide transportation system and its government-proposed solution, the Trans-Texas Corridors. “We can either address the problem, know what’s coming, and plan accordingly, or we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it will go away.” Texas Governor Rick Perry proposed the corridor system in 2002. Texas Department of Transportation and other officials echo that sentiment and are looking at the TTC to offer long-term solutions for the masses. The TTC plan to date The Trans-Texas Corridor is a proposed multi-use, statewide network of transportation routes in...

UPDATE with environment report, financing details, tariffs structure MADRID (AFX) - A consortium led by Cintra Concesiones Infraestructuras SA said it has signed its first contract to build a section of the Trans-Texas Corridor toll road project in the US and will invest 1.3 bln usd. In a statement, Cintra said the 50-year concession is to design, construct and operate segments 5 and 6 of the SH 130 motorway between Austin and Seguin. The consortium is 65 pct controlled by Cintra and 35 pct by local constructor Zachry. Cintra announced the contract in Dec 2004, and said it expected to...

They're coming whether we build it or not. That was the message about the Central Texas portion of the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC 35) delivered to the Governmental Affairs Committee of the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce Thursday by a representative of an engineering firm advising the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Between 1990 and 2000, the state's population as well as the number of vehicle miles traveled in Texas has outgrown existing lane capacity. “With some roads (the philosophy) has been build it and they will come, but the need for the TTC is here today,” said Paul...

The rural Robinson land where state Rep. Charles “Doc” Anderson, R-Waco, runs his cattle is in the 10-mile zone where state and federal officials may build the first section of the Trans-Texas Corridor. So is his home. Close to 1 million Texans are now in the uncomfortable position of seeing their property, businesses or homesteads on a map where a huge highway may be built in less than a decade. Although just a small portion, about one-fortieth, of that study area would be used for the road if it is built, the huge swath of potentially affected families and farms...

Depending on whom you talk to, the Trans Texas Corridor is a daring futuristic plan, the state's most ambitious ever, or it's a money machine and a destructive land grab. But for now, most of all, it's an enigma. There are no construction contracts for any of the 4,000 miles of car and truck lanes, freight and passenger rail lines and utility lines that are supposed to crisscross Texas by midcentury, just a $3.5 million deal with a private consortium to develop plans for the leg paralleling Interstate 35. And nobody knows just where the routes would go, though any...

AUSTIN – The Trans-Texas Corridor would be more profitable if it were built on the east side of Interstate 35E, a project official told a state committee Wednesday. In the next few weeks, state officials will probably unveil a map outlining a 10-mile-wide study area, stretching from the Red River to the Rio Grande, where the Trans-Texas Corridor could be located. Initial traffic and toll revenue predictions by project developer Cintra-Zachry show that an eastern route has the greatest potential. "We have given the state of Texas our view of where the corridor could be done more economically and faster....

Rural Texas on edge as state prepares to reveal general route of TTC-35 MALONE — On this particular morning, fog has Texas 171 socked in for the whole 15 miles east from Hillsboro to this tiny German farm town. While you can tell that the winter-bare black loam is mostly flat moving toward the invisible horizon, you can only guess what might lie beyond. Barger Geltmeier and Benny Mynar and their fellow Hill County farmers have a pretty good idea, however, what might be forming out in the fog near Austin and heading their way, and they don't much like...

Despite ardent opposition to Gov. Rick Perry's Trans Texas Corridor transportation plan, the political arm of the Texas Farm Bureau has decided to endorse Perry's bid for re-election. "It's not just about the corridor. We will continue to oppose it, and will kill it if we can," farm bureau spokesman Gene Hall said Friday. "(But) the farm bureau is not a single-issue organization." Perry, the son of West Texas tenant farmers, has worked well with the farm bureau on other issues such as water rights and the government seizure of private property known as eminent domain, Hall said. Officially, the...

Austin, TX (OPENPRESS) November 3, 2005 -- The majority of Texans are opposed to tax increases and the Trans Texas Corridor, and if enough of them learn that Proposition 1 is a smoke screen for a tax increase, they are expected to vote "no" against the proposal. "I am confident that if Texans knew the financial impact involved, and the unlimited corporate welfare of the rail fund, they would vote against Proposition 1 and defeat it," said Sal Costello, founder of People for Efficient Transportation. "No one wants east coast toll roads here in Texas, or billions in tax increases...

Get ready. TTC-35 is coming. Though Michael Behrens wouldn't use those words, not exactly, and he'd probably cringe to realize it, that's the impression he left at the end of an hour and a half of questioning Thursday. "Something is going to have to be built somewhere," the executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation said after meeting in Cameron with a group of reporters from several rural newspapers. There was touch of resignation in his voice when he said it. The Trans Texas Corridor is a proposed multi-lane transportation network designed to carry passenger, freight, rail and utilities....

Cintra-Zachry, the joint construction venture that won a $7 billion contract to start work on the controversial Trans Texas Corridor project, has written a letter to the Federal Highway Administration expressing interest in a $320 million low-interest loan. Critics say Cintra-Zachry won the contract in part because it said it would not use public dollars, but the governor’s office and the consortium say the deal didn't prohibit using federal money. Only state money was mentioned. Kathy Walt, spokeswoman for the governor, says the inquiry involves a loan, not a grant. But some state leaders remain skeptical. Mike Sizemore, press...