With a week to go, the Lege seems to have reached a crippling impasse over plans for the future of the Texas road system, and the threatened special session may become a reality if no agreement is reached by the end of the week.
On Friday, Gov. Rick Perry vetoed House Bill 1892, the House effort to use toll roads to bolster the crumbling transport infrastructure. He’s waiting for the Senate to send up its replacement, Senate Bill 792: Authored by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands, it has substantially the same aims as the House bill but has yet to pass out of the Lege.
SB 792 is meant to sweep in to save the Texas transport system. But then again, HB 1892 was going to solve everything. And so was Dallas GOPer Sen. John Carona‘s monumental transport omnibus bill, SB 1929. The Senate Transportation Committee chair’s bill is now officially DOA, having not even had its first Senate reading.
The struggle over the road system, which has become inextricably bound up with the toll-road issue, has been an epic tale of compromise between irreconcilable forces. First up were the counties around Fort Worth, Dallas, and Arlington that have started negotiations on toll roads and feel they are the only way to solve their transportation problem. On the other side are the anti-toll forces, headed up by Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, who fear that handing over the road system to private toll companies for 50 years will devastate the Texas economy for generations to come.
Take SB 792 itself: The original version was a simple but sweeping bill that gave counties the road-building powers of regional mobility authorities. The latest version includes a two-year toll-road moratorium with several bitterly negotiated exemptions and rebuilds the relationship between the RMAs and TxDOT.
The bills were built on carefully constructed compromises – yet there may be no compromises left. There is a question as to whether what is needed is a decision now, since the issue has been debated solidly by all parties. Then again, all these bills have been modified dramatically, as even proponents of toll roads have started to waiver on, if not the concept, then at least the terms of the deals being struck with private contractors. It could be that a special session may be the only way to prevent the dangerous decisions Nichols fears being made without the pressure of sine die, the last day of session, on everyone’s back.
This article appears in May 18 • 2007.
