Texas Transit Association

The coming meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission on August 28 will mark the beginning of a number of public policy shifts in state and local transportation planning. Read on.

Road plan puts local chiefs in driver’s seat
State expected to shift the way highway cash, planning are handled

By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF, August 23, 2003

State transportation officials next week likely will approve a “monumental shift” in how Texas designs and pays for major road projects, giving local officials much of the say in which projects get done.

The state’s plan, prepared by Texas Department of Transportation staff at the behest of Gov. Rick Perry, would scuttle the hat-in-hand approach to divvying up the hundreds of millions of dollars that the department dispenses each year for highways. Local officials, under the present method, come to the Texas Transportation Commission’s meetings and make a pitch for their projects.

The aim of the Texas Metropolitan Mobility Plan, according to a draft copy, is to decrease the growing traffic congestion and resultant degradation of quality of life in Texas population centers. Some who have reviewed the plan say it would mean swifter planning and construction of projects. And one likely result would be a proliferation of toll booths on new and existing highways. The three-member commission, with only enough gasoline tax money available to pay for 35 percent to 40 percent of the requested projects, leaves many local officials unhappy each year and leaves itself open to perennial charges of favoring one metro area over another.

More meaningfully, transit officials contend, the process itself is responsible for drawing out the time from project conception to completion and thus increasing congestion. The commission often grants only enough money to do a project in a piecemeal fashion, leading to situations like the snail-like progress toward Oak Hill of the U.S. 290 upgrade in Southwest Austin.

“When it takes seven to 10 years to fund projects, you’re never going to get caught up,” said Steve Simmons, deputy executive director of the state Transportation Department.

The mobility plan contemplates a new approach. The state, using a complex formula based on traffic, population, a new congestion index and other factors, would allocate a baseline amount to various regions of the state. That amount would remain essentially stable for several years at a time.

Local areas, meanwhile, would prepare regional mobility plans laying out strategies to reduce congestion. Although state gas tax money by law can go only to roads, not rail projects, the regional plans could include mass transit and other approaches to be paid for from local and federal funds.

“It is time to change the way Texas plans, funds and delivers transportation systems in metropolitan areas,” the mobility plan’s overview says. The plan “is intended to save metropolitan Texans the most precious nonrenewable resource: time.”

The proposal would affect about $10 billion in state highway grants to metropolitan areas over the next 15 years.

The plan, assuming the Transportation Commission approves it at its meeting Thursday as expected, would mean that the board is “getting out of the business of approving work project-by-project,” said Glenn Gadbois, director of transportation programs for the Just Transportation Alliances. “This is a monumental shift.”

One key question: Who gets to design the local plans?

Initially, at least, it likely will be federally mandated transit coalitions such as the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization in Central Texas. The so-called MPOs, which already make decisions about how to spend some federal transportation money, typically cover much of a given metro area, including outlying counties, and are governed by elected officials appointed to their boards.

The Central Texas version, CAMPO, has 21 members on its board from Travis, Hays and Williamson counties, and officials from the two smaller counties are frequently worried about getting their fair share of the transportation money.

Thanks to laws passed by the Legislature in 2001 and this year, a potential rival to CAMPO has emerged — the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority run by appointees of the commissions of Williamson and Travis counties. The authority’s purpose is to build toll roads, and it could have more suburban leanings than the Austin-centric CAMPO board.

But Mike Weaver of Prime Strategies, a transportation consultant hired by the local mobility authority to help oversee operations until a permanent staff is in place, said such authorities likely will have only a seat at the table, not the head chair.

Even so, several transportation officials said the new approach almost surely would result in more toll roads in the state. The idea is that with a reliable source of state funds, local communities would be better able to line up other money, including potential partnerships with private investors looking to own a piece of a toll road.