Texas Department of Transportation Commission Meeting

Intercontinental Hotel
2222 West Loop South
Houston, Texas

Thursday, January 27, 2005

COMMISSION MEMBERS:

RIC WILLIAMSON, CHAIRMAN
JOHN W. JOHNSON
ROBERT L. NICHOLS
HOPE ANDRADE
TED HOUGHTON, JR.

STAFF:

MICHAEL W. BEHRENS, P.E., Executive Director
STEVE SIMMONS, Deputy Executive Director
RICHARD MONROE, General Counsel
ROGER POLSON, Executive Assistant to the Deputy Executive Director
DEE HERNANDEZ, Chief Minute Clerk

PROCEEDINGS

MR. WILLIAMSON: Good morning. It is 9:14 a.m. and I would like to call the January meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission to order here in Houston, Texas. It is a pleasure to have each of you here this morning at this, our first meeting of the new year.

This is the eighth Highway or Transportation Commission meeting to be held here in Houston. It has been almost five years since our last trip. We note, with great pleasure, that while congestion is still a problem, it' s not nearly as bad as it was five years ago, and we' re here to tell you that it will not be nearly as bad five years from now when we return, or in four years, as the fellow suggested, to break the champagne bottle on Interstate 10 as it' s opened up -- unless we use the ribbon-cutting idea you had where we were going to stop traffic for two hours and string ribbon across it.

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: But only you and me come up with that because we don' t live in urban Texas.

Please note for the record that the public notice of this meeting, containing all items on the agenda, was filed with the Office of Secretary of State at 3:11 p.m. on January 18, 2005. The agenda and the other commission documents, such as meeting minutes and transcripts, are also available on our TxDOT website.

Before we begin today' s meeting, for those of you who don' t attend our meetings very often, we place high value on not being interrupted by telephones, pagers, Blackberries and all the other electronic devices people carry these days, so as a favor to me, Ted, would you reach in your pocket, get your phone, Blackberry, whatever you carry, and put it on the silent or vibrate mode. Thank you very much.

As is our custom, we will open with comments from the commission and we will begin this morning with Commissioner Houghton who is on your far left of the dais.

MR. HOUGHTON: Good morning, and I want to thank you for the tremendous hospitality that' s been extended to myself and my fellow commissioners.

How many people in here have heard me speak in the last 24-48 hours? There' s not a whole lot I can say.

(General laughter.)

MR. HOUGHTON: But I can say one thing because officially I want to officially, for the record, extend birthday greetings to three people on the dais, Chairman Ric Williamson, Executive Director Michael Behrens, and the home boy Johnny Johnson, which have birthdays within a week and of this week, I guess Monday, Johnny. And Johnny, I' m not going to talk about your age; I think it' s around the official speed limit but I' m not sure.

MR. JOHNSON: School zone.

(General laughter.)

MR. HOUGHTON: But again, what a dynamic community you have -- I don' t need to tell you that. It' s the economic driver in the state of Texas; we all benefit, even those of us who live in far West Texas in El Paso. And I thank you for having us.

MS. ANDRADE: Good morning. Thank you for being here this morning. And I' m so glad when Ted asked the question how many have heard him speak within the past 24 hours that all of you are still smiling. So thank you for being here. It' s great to be in Houston, it' s a great way to start off our year. And thank you also to those that have come from elsewhere to Houston.

You know, we' ve got a tremendous job in 2005. Yesterday when I was in Austin and I heard the governor' s State of the State Address, he talked about all the jobs that have been created, he talked about all the new opportunities that are coming our way, and so certainly it puts a lot of pressure on us that we have to prepare this wonderful state because people keep wanting to move to Texas.

So Mr. Chairman, I look forward to taking care of the business that we have to take care of today and keeping transportation moving forward in Texas. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do you want to go last?

MR. JOHNSON: No.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay.

MR. JOHNSON: As Ted mentioned, this is a home game for me and there' s a certain pleasure and luxury in having an occasional home game. It is wonderful to see so many good friends here and to see this room full.

I mentioned at breakfast and I mentioned again last night, each of you in some form or fashion is a partner in the transportation challenges that we face in this community and in the state, and when we work together, whether it' s the county or the partnership or whatever, we can perform miracles and climb the highest mountain, and when we have separate agendas, it makes the challenges that much more difficult.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate what you do for the communities that you serve and the greater community at large, because I do think, as Hope referred to, we' re making significant progress on surface transportation, multimodal challenges, and the issues of moving Houstonians and Texans to where they want to go and moving the goods and services through the network of this state to make it one of the economic prides and joys of this country.

Thank you for all you do and it' s great having a home game.

MR. NICHOLS: I' d also like to thank you for giving us the hospitality you have and for you taking the time today to be with us. It' s a very exciting time in transportation.

A lot of us came in yesterday, we got some good tours. It was kind of interesting, we rode the Metro buses and then we rode the train, we saw the Metro board, and it was actually an interesting way to see some of the highway construction projects by riding the train. And one of the things the Metro board taught us as we got on the train, they said, You' ve got to learn the wrist action. And I said, Well, what' s that? They said, As we' re riding the train as it parallels 59, at five o' clock and all the cars are jammed up and stuck as you go by, you' re supposed to kind of do like this.

(General laughter.)

MR. NICHOLS: No, they didn' t really do that. I do look forward to today, though. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I echo the remarks of my fellow commissioners. We are pleased to be in Houston, one of the economic centers and economic generation centers of the state, very important to the entire state of Texas.

When we go on the road, we have people who never go to any of our other meetings, so to keep you from being a little bit surprised, the governor places a high value on civilized discourse and a teamwork approach to problem-solving, so the five of us are very comfortable with each other, we tend to be very informal. The commission has an executive director who runs the department and he will conduct most of the meeting. The commission members individually will interrupt guests and witnesses and ask questions and dialogue throughout the meeting, so don' t be surprised.

We do also value frank and candid conversation, so if you have some thoughts about any of our agenda items and wish to share those thoughts with the public, we mightily encourage you to do that. And in that regard, if you' re going to comment on an item that is on our agenda, it' s posted on our agenda, we would appreciate it if you would fill out a yellow card similar to this. We have some up here at the front, I think there' s some at the table in the lobby outside, and we would appreciate you completing this if you' re going to comment on an agenda item.

If you' re not going to comment on an agenda item but you want to share with us your thoughts in general about transportation matters, we ask that you fill out the blue card. Again, it can be found at the table in the lobby outside the door to your left.

Regardless of the color of the card, because our meetings tend to last a long time, we ask that you try to limit your remarks to three minutes, unless you' re an elected member of the Texas Legislature, in which case you can speak for as long as you wish.

In that regard, is there a House or a Senate member present in the room that we were not aware of?

There are lots of former members -- we' re going to have a former member meeting up here after the commission meeting -- Judge Eckels, Judge Willy, Dalton Smith, Ed Emmett, and I' m sure there are others that I can' t see because at 53 I' m failing in my eyesight.

The commission, which usually holds our meetings in Austin, travels to various cities and towns across Texas three times a year. This gives us a chance to see some of the ideas that have been developed by our district employees and to see firsthand some of the issues which each community in the state faces. It gives us a chance to observe how communities are dealing with their transportation challenges and how they' re using their facilities for the best interest of their citizens and visitors.

It' s always a pleasure to hear from local transportation leaders in our host community -- that' s very important to us. We expect that Mayor White is going to be here around 10:15 and we' re going to hear his comments at that time. The way we would like to start the meeting off is recognize our TxDOT District Engineer Gary Trietsch; he' s going to take you and us through a quick presentation.

And then we most normally take breaks in between presentations because there are some men and women here that are here for a particular presentation who have to work for a living and need to get back to their job, and we understand that. So we' ll frequently take breaks, get up, stretch, use the restroom, whatever, while people exit the room.

One of the truly great district engineers in the state of Texas, Gary Trietsch. It' s all yours, Gary.

MR. TRIETSCH: Thank you, Chairman Williamson.

We have several speakers here today and I' d like to start with Jodie Jiles who is chair of the Greater Houston Partnership. He' s got some comments.

MR. JILES: Good morning, Chairman and commissioners. My name is Jodie Jiles -- as Jim Koloft passes by -- and I am representing the Greater Houston Partnership today. I' m also representing the Gulf Coast Regional Mobility Partners, and I would like for our region business leaders, elected officials, and other representatives of both the partnership and the Houston region to please stand. If you would stand if you' re from Houston, because everybody is a leader in here. So if you' re from Houston and you' re in the business community, please stand.

This is Houston' s leadership in its finest form, and we thank you for being here.

(Applause.)

MR. JILES: And by the way, most of the people around the wall are from Houston as well too.

But Mr. Chairman, I' d be remiss if I didn' t start off by saying this is the hometown of Johnny Johnson, one of your commissioners, and Johnny is a business leader and a community servant that leads beyond compare. We are honored to have you in Johnny' s hometown and we are honored to be here with Johnny Johnson representing Houston and the region.

I' m also pleased to have Jim Koloft, who is our president and CEO, here with us. But more importantly, you said it, Mr. Chairman, you said Gary Trietsch.

And Gary, we love you, we appreciate you, and we' re thankful for you, and that' s the bottom line.

Gary has been here a long time and worked through a lot of issues and we are a team and we want to work and move forward as a team.

Mr. Chairman, you stated -- and I got this from a reliable source -- that you' ve gone from being the parent to the partner, from the parent to the partner -- a preacher told me to say it twice if you want to emphasize it, Mr. Chairman, and that' s why I said it twice -- and the bottom line is this Texas Mobility Plan and the emphasis that this commission puts on the Texas Mobility Plan and working together to accomplish good roads and good transportation for this urban area, we appreciate you and we salute you for that partnership, and we look forward to that continued partnership for the good of this community first, and the state second, and we thank you all.

And the bottom line is that we are here to work with you, not "agin" you; we are for you and we' re a team; it' s us, not I or me. And we thank you for being here and we appreciate all that you do for the great state of Texas. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

MR. TRIETSCH: Next, David Wolff who is chair of the Metropolitan Transit Authority. David.

MR. WOLFF: Mr. Chairman and commissioners. It was a pleasure being with several of you yesterday; I hope you enjoyed the tour and that it was kind of informative.

On behalf of Metro and the 4.4 million people in the Houston metropolitan area, we welcome you and thank you for the hard work that you do for all of Texas. We have a history of a strong and productive relationship with TxDOT that goes back over 25 years.

As the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, I want you to know that mobility remains the single greatest concern of the people of Houston. We believe that the solution to this problem is cooperative in nature, it is not roads versus transit, that' s why you are the Texas Department of Transportation.

Our goal is improved mobility through a fully integrated multimodal regional transportation system. And I' m here today to ask for your assistance as we carry out several initiatives as this region grows to 6.6 million people over the next 20 years.

We are pursuing (a) the conversion of our 100-mile network of HOV lanes to high occupancy toll lanes and the dualization of these HOV facilities. Of very great importance, we ask you to work with us on the introduction and development of commuter rail in suburban corridors that will expand our service area into those rapidly growing areas outside of our current service area. We believe that these can be tied in to our light rail system at our intermodal facilities, one of which is now being studied in cooperation with a grant from TxDOT.

We' re also looking to preserve space that would allow us to ultimately introduce high-speed rail service in the I-10 corridor with the capability to expand beyond our urban region.

We' re very confident of our ability to work with TxDOT because we have accomplished great things with you in the past: the 100 miles of high-occupancy vehicle lanes that move over 120,000 trips per day, relieving the pressure off of the main lanes; the development, working with TxDOT, of Transtar; the contribution which we make, that is Metro, of $100 million a year to a general mobility program allowing Harris County, the City of Houston, and 14 smaller cities to provide much needed mobility projects, many in cooperation with TxDOT.

And we are also installing, at the cost of $120 million, modern traffic control signal systems at 1,300 intersections throughout the metropolitan area which will promote the movement of cars, buses, trucks, et cetera.

As an example of the approach we are taking, we have hired a new president and CEO who is with me today, Frank Wilson. Frank was previously the commissioner of transportation for the State of New Jersey. With that responsibility, he ran the commuter rail lines into Penn Station, he oversaw the Highway Department in New Jersey, he oversaw one of the most famous toll roads in the United States, the New Jersey Turnpike. Prior to that, he was the number one person at BART in San Francisco.

I told people that when we were recruiting our new CEO that I was very pleasantly surprised with the response that we had from people around the country. In Houston we see so many of the problems that we have on a day-to-day basis but those are the problems of growth and there are many cities around the country who would gladly change places with us. There were many people running authorities in the older cities in the United States who wanted to come to Houston and have the opportunity to run Metro.

And so I think this is something we have to keep in mind when we look at the congestion and the mobility problems we deal with caused by people wanting to come to Houston because of the opportunities which were mentioned by Commissioner Andrade and because they want the opportunity to have a better life, and it' s our responsibility to help them get that.

As you saw yesterday, the 7-1/2 mile light rail line which we opened has quickly established a new means of transportation within our urban core. The Houston Chronicle reported on January 17 that the Metro Rail Main Street line is the number one light rail line in the nation on a boardings-per-mile basis. We have daily ridership of 33,000 people per day. This is way above our first-year forecast, and in fact, we are already beginning to approach the forecasted level for the year 2020.

With one-sixth the mileage of DART, our neighbor to the north which runs a very successful light rail line, we are carrying more than one-half of their daily passenger boardings, and we' re very proud of this for what it means for our future.

I thank you for the opportunity to address this commission, I appreciate the great work you do. Having a similar job, I know the amount of work and stress and the demands, and I think you' re doing a great job.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, David. Hang on a second, will you.

MR. WOLFF: Yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I failed to ask members, any dialogue with Mr. Jiles? With Mr. Wolff, anything?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I want to thank you for your remarks, and I want to emphasize publicly what I emphasized with you privately last night. This governor has a different viewpoint of transportation. As I told you, he' s not a fan of buses, but he believes a robust commuter system has to be a part of solving the state' s transportation problem. And we are probably spending more time and more money every month seeing where we can fit, as partners, with our great urban areas in Texas on solving the commuter matter than we spent in all the years prior to this governor' s election.

So our door is wide open for suggestions, proposals, entrepreneurial ways of helping a robust commuter rail system in this area spring up and grow quickly.

Our staff has been studying -- and we' re not ready to publish it and stand behind it, but we' re getting pretty close -- we' ve been studying an approach to the level at which the taxpayers of this state subsidize highways. There has always been this great canyon of agreement between the road guys and the transit guys about the level of subsidy for transit that' s out there, but the reality is we subsidize a lot of roads in the state -- in fact, we may subsidize near 90 percent of our roads.

And so it seems to me that if the Department of Transportation can give an objective viewpoint of what the road subsidy is in any given situation, it begins to lay the groundwork for a civilized discussion about if you have a limited resource, how much of it do you put into a subsidized road and how much of it do you put into a subsidized commuter line.

I want to say again, I don' t think our guy will ever be interested in subsidizing buses, he thinks that' s a city responsibility, but he has some intense interest in the relationship between road construction and a robust commuter system. So the door is open.

MR. WOLFF: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you for being here.

The Jersey Pike, huh?

MR. WILSON: A minor toll road.

MR. TRIETSCH: Frank Wilson probably has the best credentials of anybody I' ve ever heard. And I think you can tell from Mr. Wolff' s comments, Metro is not your typical transit agency. They do a lot of different things and they make a very good partner.

I' d like to kind of lay the groundwork for my two heavy hitters from Galveston and Harris County, so my presentation will be a power point, and as I told you last night, it' s not as good as what you saw last night, you' ll have to put up with me. But we' ve entitled this "Expecting The Unexpectable." See, we are expecting the unexpectable.

(General laughter.)

MR. TRIETSCH: Actually, I can make this a whole lot shorter and maybe save some time. You saw most of the pictures last night on the video. I think the points I would like to leave you with is that in this region, a coastal region, there are a lot of things that happen: flooding, hurricanes, with major traffic incidents. I mean, we' ve had bridges burn down, we' ve even had a bridge hit by a ship twice in the Houston Ship Channel. And it even snows in Galveston and Brazoria County.

(General laughter.)

MR. TRIETSCH: That little picture up by Galveston was snow on the beach. But here' s some of the things that have happened to the Houston District in the past few years, and it goes on and on.

Houston is an international city with world trading partners. We have 83 consuls' offices in the city; we are the fourth largest city and soon to be the third largest city.

The mundane facts: a little over 3,000 centerline miles of roadway, ranked 17th of the 25 districts; we' ve got about 10,000 miles which is fourth. But here' s what David referred to: we' re going to add over 2 million people in the next 20 years in this region.

You mentioned this morning about being a billion dollars in 2003; we hit a billion dollars last year -- I call $960 million a billion dollars, you know, I' m an engineer, rounding off. We' re going to hit a billion dollars, probably 1.1 or so, this fiscal year, but you can look back in > 94 we were under $400 million.

And that last bar is what we' ve paid out to date, but we' ve made over $600 million in contractor pay-outs in 2004, and in 1996 it was under $100 million.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Gary, can I stop you just a minute?

MR. TRIETSCH: You bet.

MR. WILLIAMSON: For those in the audience who, like many of us before we get exposed to this world, might be a little confused by this different analysis, what you' re basically telling the audience is "this is what we spent in my district, cash paid out."

MR. TRIETSCH: That' s right.

MR. JOHNSON: On construction.

MR. TRIETSCH: Just on construction, doesn' t include maintenance.

MR. WILLIAMSON: When I came on the commission in 2001, one of the very first controversies that I was exposed to was it seemed like the never-ending argument about is Houston and Dallas getting enough money, and I know that my friends at The Houston Chronicle were skeptical that we were paying enough attention to the Houston area. And we tried to explain that the nature of highway construction planning is such that it kind of rotates around the state; we spend less money planning in Houston while we execute a plan in Jacksonville and finish a plan in Weatherford, and that cycle drops those dollars. We assured Houston leadership that by early 2003, because of more cycles, it would cycle back to Houston and now we see the results of that.

Is it accurate, Mike, to say that we' re spending more money in the Houston District right now than we are in any other district in the state?

MR. BEHRENS: Yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thanks, Gary.

MR. TRIETSCH: Appreciate that.

Next slide. One of the reasons we' ve been able to do this, we couldn' t do it without our other partners, the consultants, the private sector industry. As you can see, back in 2000 we were paying out under $10 million a year. Again, these are actual cash dollars, how much we were actually spending. We' re spending over $50 million a year now. Seventy percent of our design work, the stuff it takes to get a project to contract, are now being done by the private sector. Could not even begin to do this kind of workload to let a billion dollars a year without their help.

We' re actually one of the smallest districts when it comes to physical size. We' re the third smallest district; we' ve got 2.2 percent of the land, the six counties here, of Texas. But with population and volume, we' re almost a quarter of the state, so that big red blob is our six counties kind of blown up a little bit. We didn' t make it to El Paso but we can get to San Antonio and to Dallas. For the people of the audience that don' t know what the Houston District is, it' s these six counties.

Quickly to go through some of our major projects, obviously the Fred Hartman Bridge, Pierce Elevated, the removal of the Baytown Tunnel. What' s interesting, it costs more to remove it than it did to put it in 1951. And obviously we' re proud of the arched bridges, the gateway to Houston. And the first TxDOT railroad project, in conjunction with the Houston Port Authority, to build a 9.3 mile line, $12.1 million using Congestion Mitigation Air Quality funds.

We do think we' re a good citizen. Down on Bolivar in > 87 we had a place on the beach that was about to wash the roadway out, and further north has already been washed out, so we did this project, working with the Corps, working with the General Land Office and many others, $3 million to create wetlands and marsh and put the granite boulders to protect the shore.

Obviously we' ve got a lot going on right now. The largest single contract in the state of Texas, $262 million, the West Loop and the Katy Freeway. And I apologize to Jay Nelson, I told him it would not go above what the High Five was, and if the contractor had bid what we estimated, it wouldn' t have.

(General laughter.)

MR. TRIETSCH: The West Loop, a series of three projects, the total reconstruction of the West Loop while under traffic; the Katy Freeway, the Tri-Party Agreement with Harris County, TxDOT and the Federal Highway Administration. And here are the Katy Freeway projects let to date and we' ve got two more, and in another five-six weeks, we will have virtually all but the last project, the $38 million let on the Katy Freeway and we' ll have 23 miles of it under contract and under construction.

What you saw yesterday, the Spur 527 and Southwest US 59. And probably the project that I' m very, very proud of is rebuilding the Galveston Causeway. I hadn' t been down here long and we had to let an emergency contract to kind of structurally prop it up, and although it was safe and sound, it just looked awful. I mean, it was like you' ve got Band-aids all over your hand holding that thing together, and we were finally able to get this project under construction, and next year about this time, 14 months from now, we' ll be switching truck traffic on half of the new bridge.

We' re still trying to provide better service with our ferry system, and right now no matter how many ferries we have, how many people, we' ve only got the two landings, so a $30 million project to add a landing on each side, the Bolivar and the Galveston side.

Transtar, you' ve heard over and over again, three of the last four years it' s won the US DOT award for top website for traffic management. The Green Ribbon Project, basically this is from very selfish reason, it' s not only the hardscape, the walls, the bridges, but it' s also the landscaping. We' ve worked with locals, the Buffalo Bayou Association and others, but I say I' m doing this all from very selfish reasons: if I can reforest and replant, maybe in ten years from now my mowing will be about 20 percent of what it is now. And obviously you' ll hear over and over again we couldn' t do this without our mobility partners.

Quickly just future projects, the Grand Parkway and US 290, unfortunately, another billion dollar project but we are working with Harris County Toll Road Authority and seeing what we can work out to cut that price, at least on our end of it.

With that, I think that' s the last slide. We do have traffic problems but as we were taking Commissioner Houghton around yesterday, it stops congestion every place. We are making progress but we do have major infrastructure that we' re going to have to rebuild, we showed him a little bit of that. And the East Loop, the North Loop, where some of our heaviest truck traffic, the pavement is literally worn out and we' re replacing some of that now and will continue to do that the next couple of years.

With that, I' d like to introduce -- unless any of you have any questions.

MR. JOHNSON: I' d like to make a comment, Gary. I don' t want to interrupt you, but looking at the video last night and also this slide show reminds me of how complex this district is and how complex your job is. And I don' t want to embarrass you, Gary, but four weeks from tomorrow Gary Trietsch is going to be awarded the Engineer of the Year Award, and Gary is quick to point out that the award should actually go to the entire Houston District, all 1,500 employees, and he' s right in that regard. He' s like a good football coach, in that he knows who blocks and tackles and who' s responsible for his success.

But I' ve got to say one thing, Gary, we have one hell of a coach here and it' s an award that you richly deserve.

(Applause.)

MR. TRIETSCH: Thank you.

MR. HOUGHTON: I want to thank you for your hospitality yesterday. I got to see, from the ground this time, Houston; last time it was from a helicopter. And I do have one question: Why did you take out the tunnel underneath the channel?

MR. TRIETSCH: Actually we had to. It was in there by permit and the permit back in the late > 40s said that when we no longer were using it, we had to remove it, and one of those things you sign thinking that will never happen.

(General laughter.)

MR. TRIETSCH: But the other part of it, not only because that' s what was in our Coast Guard -- I think it was the Coast Guard or Corps of Engineers permit, but the other thing was, and if you get a chance to read the Chronicle this morning, just about to complete the widening and deepening of the Houston Ship Channel and the ships were literally scraping the top of the tunnel while it was still in use.

MR. HOUGHTON: That' s disconcerting.

MR. TRIETSCH: So that' s another reason. And we actually didn' t take it all out, parts of the ends are still there but the part that' s directly under the channel did come out. I' ll send you a video we made on that too, that whole process.

MR. HOUGHTON: I' d like to see it. It didn' t leak like the Big Dig in Boston, did it?

MR. TRIETSCH: Not that badly but they all leak. It' s kind of like depressed freeway sections in Houston: they will flood eventually some day.

MR. HOUGHTON: Again, thank you, Gary, very much.

MR. TRIETSCH: I' m going to introduce my next two speakers. I' ve asked Harris County Judge Robert Eckels and Galveston County Judge Jim Yarbrough to come up and say a few words. I could have asked any of the county judges, any of the mayors we work with, but these are two of our very good partners and I think their comments will probably echo the region.

So Robert, I' ll let you start out, and Jim, I' ll let you do clean-up.

JUDGE ECKELS: Thank you. And again, Gary, I appreciate your service, and I really do appreciate the commission being here today. We are honored to have you in Houston and it has been too long, Ric; come back next month. I like that picture of the traffic sitting up there while we' re talking to the Highway Commission. They' ll remember it.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, Robert, just go ahead and tell them about the resolution that you tried to pass transferring the capital down to Houston.

(General laughter.)

JUDGE ECKELS: That was my predecessors a while back. We' re just going to try to make the economic capital of Texas Houston, and we' ll come up to Austin once or twice a year for whatever work that we need up there. The allergies that bother me every time I get close to the capital, I don' t know what that is.

I am, again, really pleased to have you here and pleased to be here with our partners, Metro and the City of Houston, TxDOT, of course Gary Trietsch. He' s a great district engineer and I know that that billion dollars has been good training, he really needs to try the $2 billion year and I' d encourage you to try that in the very near future.

I' m also pleased to have Commissioner Johnson here. You' ve served us well for a number of years and have really enjoyed getting to know and work with him as a commissioner on TxDOT. And your service to our community and to the state is much appreciated, commissioner, and we' re glad to be working with you. And I still am pleased that you changed that Johnson Grass name out there a while back.

We have, again, a number of partners we' re working with and those are evidenced by the kinds of big projects you saw. Gary mentioned the Katy Freeway is a 21-mile expansion project, and it' s being constructed both with TxDOT and Harris County in partnership, much accelerating the construction of that. We' re looking forward to the 290/610 interchange and on out on 290 and continuing to build those partnerships further, congestion-relief projects in this region, particularly in light of the financial constraints we' re all under, and we look forward to continuing those partnerships.

Our E-Z Tag program for the Toll Road Authority now has over a million tags in place. We do have that now interoperable with other systems around the state and look forward to continuing to expand that and those partnerships.

The Grand Parkway State Highway 99, the 170-mile loop around the Houston metro area is the third outer beltway. The TxDOT folks have been working together with us on the project and in January -- in fact, at our last meeting the commissioners court authorized further studies to determine its viability and the extent of our partnerships, as well as where that road alignment might go to have a minimal impact on the community and the greatest benefit to this region.

I also here am wearing the hat of the Interstate 69 Alliance, and we are very concerned about the connectivity between the Port of Houston and the economic engine that is our community with international trading partners in Mexico to the south and up north to the industrial Midwest. That project continues to be a major concern for this region. We are pleased that it has been selected as one of the four priority segments of the Trans-Texas Corridor.

We fully support the Trans-Texas concept, and in fact, we' re an organization made up of folks all along that route that was one of the first groups to endorse that concept, and again, look forward to continuing to work with you on developing both that corridor and the impacts it will have on this Houston region.

We also have in our community currently a freight rail/commuter rail study, working with TxDOT and Metro, the Port of Houston and Harris County, and the Port right now being the lead funding agency, following in with TxDOT. We do appreciate the partnership and the working together with this organization. And Gary, as we look at both freight rail crossings and frequencies of freight train crossings, safety issues on freight rail crossings, you' ll probably hear later about concerns of schools and neighborhoods and access for emergency vehicles, but also tying in with the commuter rail prospects that was mentioned earlier by representatives from Metro.

Long term we' re also working on high-speed rail projects, not only serving this community but linking Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio and the high-speed rail projects out there.

I also chair the TPC for this region, the policy council, and want to thank you and the staff beyond Gary that work so closely to help us coordinate our projects, not just here but across the region, through not just the Houston District but the district to our east out of Beaumont.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention a little bit of the funding issues of the Houston region with the Port, manufacturing and industrial, financial and distribution centers in this area that is a large economic engine that drives much of the economy of the state. We are very concerned about the congestion and the impact that congestion has on that economic engine. It is a concern that I know that this commission shares.

No highway commission has done more to build creative solutions and partnerships with us at a difficult time to reduce congestion in this region, and we do appreciate and are very cognizant of the spending that we are seeing in the Houston District now.

We are going to remind you again about its impact on the state. I know you' re aware of that, and let you know we do appreciate very much the activity you' ve had in this community. But at the same time that you' re spending money in this community, we, like everybody else, want more. At the same time you' ve been much more sensitive to the needs and the concerns of the community, I think, than in the past.

Often TxDOT is viewed as an agency that has its way and just blows through and doesn' t listen to the community as much, but recently we had a little dust up on 249 with the concerns of the citizens and Representative Hamric convened a meeting and Chairman Williamson drove down. I think that really had a big impact on the folks out there and it is reverberating throughout the region that they' re seeing a different TxDOT than they have in the past. The commission, Gary, the leadership has indicated a real interest in trying to work with the community.

Finally, I will tell you that we do have great partnerships around this region. Judge Yarbrough will follow up with me. We had a meeting yesterday looking not only at the congestion needs of this community but also hurricane evacuation routes and the need to be able to move people in the event of a major disaster.

You are working closely with us through Transtar and other operations on intelligent transportation systems that can help with those evacuation routes, shorter term solutions of notifications into the community, and the longer term we do need help with projects like the Highway 146 projects and other routes coming out of the Galveston-Brazoria area into and through Houston and into points across the state of Texas.

I do want to thank you, Chairman Williamson, particularly, and Johnny Johnson for your help in getting the 330 Loop at Baytown. That serves an industrial base and truck and transportation needs; it' s also a major evacuation route for us and it is an important part of our project.

Judge Yarbrough will follow up and talk a little bit more about the specific hurricane evacuation route needs, I think, and interest in the suburban counties. Judge Willy is here and some commissioners from other counties.

The Harris County commissioners have got an aggressive project of relief for congestion in this community through the county, and we look forward to continuing to coordinate that with the state and the realization that the solution is not a state solution or a county solution or a city solution or a Metro solution, but it' s a transportation solution for this region.

So thank you very much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Commission members, for Judge Eckels?

JUDGE ECKELS: We have a power point presentation, but after Gary' s, I' m just going to leave you the disk.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Before Judge Eckels became Judge Eckels, he was one of the best House members in the Texas Legislature.

JUDGE ECKELS: The intelligence of both went up as I left, is that what they say?

MR. WILLIAMSON: I think the legislature suffered and Harris County gained when you left.

JUDGE ECKELS: I appreciate that.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Hey, let me ask you two questions. The governor and the commission have been focused on looking at rail from a different perspective for close to two years now. We wouldn' t want to use this public forum to criticize our Congressional leadership, but how would you suggest we approach the majority leader and the senior senator and get them to understand that addressing the rail problem is addressing the road problem, and while Amtrak may be a lot of fun to play with, we really don' t much care about Amtrak down here, we care about getting UP out of our backyard? How would you suggest we do that?

JUDGE ECKELS: I believe that large steps have been taken in that direction. Congressman DeLay, Majority Leader DeLay has been a strong advocate of the partnership we put together on the freight rail study. We have had extensive meetings with him, with TxDOT officials down here, Gary working closely, new meetings and a new willingness of Metro to engage and listen to the concern, I think not only of the congressman but also of the community in this region that many have represented.

And I think you heard that in the comments today with our discussion of commuter rail options, ways to build more than they could do on the light rail project alone. So I do think that those steps are being made. In my discussions with Congressman DeLay, I think he' s open to ideas that make sense for traffic.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Maybe you' re the open door to that deal.

JUDGE ECKELS: We' ll continue to work with; I' m happy to do that. He, I think like everyone else, wants to see the money spent on places that make a difference, and I believe he' s coming around to the consideration that Metro is serious about making a difference, not just about building a train of some kind.

I do hope that Metro in their discussions will continue to look at ways to learn both of the good and the bad things of the current project. I think we' re still seeing that trains and cars don' t mix particularly well; you see a little bit of traffic problems east and west through the main street corridor downtown. By and large, the train is probably functioning as it was designed to do, but whether that design is adequate to really solve congestion problems of this community is ultimately the things that we' ll continue to work on.

And I think when all those issues are resolved that you' ll see an enthusiastic Congressional delegation supporting this like they support other projects. I-10 is a great example of the Congressional delegation trying to clear the hurdles so that we can get creative in partnerships to do more for this community. I believe we' ll see the same thing on this.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, any suggestions you have for us we' d appreciate because sometimes we kind of wonder what we' re doing wrong.

The other thing is thank you for your compliments to the department. As you remember, the employees are as open or not open, depending upon who the governor is and who his or her commission members are, and it' s our view that this governor is more interested in transportation than any governor before him.

JUDGE ECKELS: I would not argue that one bit. I think Governor Perry has shown tremendous vision in building a creative solution to a continuing problem, building partnerships that have never existed before, a willingness and an ability to work between TxDOT and the community and the local governments that is very refreshing. So I' m very pleased with that.

I know that Mike has had a lot to do with that since you brought him on as the director. We' ve had good relations with TxDOT in the past, but it' s been much better in the last few years.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We appreciate your acknowledging that; it really makes us feel good. It' s good to see you, Robert.

JUDGE ECKELS: Thank you. And I will, again, leave this Interstate 69 disk so you' ll have time for other folks.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you. Judge, we won' t put you through the same boiler.

(Applause.)

JUDGE YARBROUGH: We' re not only glad you' re here, I' m glad I' m here. And Mr. Chairman, we do want to thank you for bringing the meeting to Houston. We couldn' t survive without TxDOT and what you do for us. And Commissioner Johnson not only helps us on road projects but in his capacity as a member of the CCC, he' s helped Galveston County on erosion and beach-related issues, and we appreciate that very much, Commissioner, as well.

I want to just echo the comments, the analogy of a great head coach was appropriate. Gary Trietsch is just a pleasure to work with. Again, we could not do things in Galveston County by ourselves; we understood that a long time ago. For a long time in Galveston County we' ve understood that TxDOT is looking for partners, not dependents, and the people of Galveston County have routinely approved bond issues for road construction back 35-40 years ago and do that on a frequent basis even up most recently in 2002.

So we try to take our dollars and stretch them with the region. We' ve got a great partnership with Robert Eckels and Judge Willy -- I know the judge is here. Evacuation is a concern of ours. We met yesterday extensively with partners in the region to talk about how we can better prepare this region for evacuation because we' ve got so many new people in the area that may not understand what hurricanes are all about.

And so we' ll be working within the system to try to maybe rearrange some priorities and take some bottlenecks out of 146, Highway 3 and some areas over in Brazoria County, leading into the Houston and Harris County highway system. And we' ll be working with Gary and our partners to try to move those priorities up the list.

We also want to take the opportunity to thank you for not only the commission' s work but the department' s work, working with the legislature to come up with new ways of doing business. The pass-through toll and things like that are things we' re exploring in Galveston County and want to take advantage of, looking for ways to leverage the resources and come up with new ways to bring dollars into our region, into our projects quicker, and so we appreciate having those tools available to us.

Again, my main purpose here today is to not only thank Gary but the staff he' s put together to help us on our projects, and I know I speak for the surrounding counties, Harris and the City of Houston, to thank the commission for your aggressive leadership. And we know there' s never enough resources, and I may get run out of the room, but quite honestly, in Galveston County we get our fair share and we appreciate it. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you for saying that.

(Applause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I guess, Judge, no one wanted to ask any questions, and we appreciate those kind words.

Is the mayor available yet?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Where do you want to take this, Gary? Do you want to take a short break?

MR. TRIETSCH: You can just go ahead.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. I' ll turn it over to Executive Director Behrens.

MR. BEHRENS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Our agenda item number 2 is an award that' s going to be made and there' s a lot been discussed this morning about partnerships in this area. Amadeo Saenz, our director of Engineering, is our liaison with the National Highway Quality Initiative and they' re going to recognize one of the partnerships that' s happened here in Houston in the past year. Amadeo?

MR. SAENZ: Thank you, Mr. Behrens. Mr. Chairman, commissioners, for the record, I' m Amadeo Saenz, assistant executive director for Engineering.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Amadeo, I need to interrupt you for a moment.

MR. SAENZ: Yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: As you might imagine, this is the largest engineering firm in the state of Texas and we are a rules-driven body, and I just realized that our legal staff reminded me that we need to approve our minutes before we go on to other business.

So thanking a great legal staff, we will continue our other business pending Mayor White' s arrival, and we need to approve the minutes of the December commission meeting. Do I have a motion?

MR. JOHNSON: So moved.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do I have a second?

MR. NICHOLS: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second to approve the commission meeting minutes from the December meeting. All those in favor will say aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

Please, Mr. Saenz.

MR. SAENZ: Thank you.

For this item, though, I am basically speaking as a representative of the National Partnership for Highway Quality as I am on the steering committee for that organization.

The National Partnership for Highway Quality continues to be the only national organization that looks to uniting the federal, state and private industry into looking at how to develop projects and develop partnerships in these projects to get these projects done much faster and much more efficient.

Our vision is to have total commitment to transportation quality and customer satisfaction in every state. Our mission is to champion the ever-improving highway quality and customer satisfaction with partners and stakeholders.

As part of our program, we have an annual awards program and the program that we had for last year, 2004, was the "Making a Difference" Award. These "Making a Difference" Awards are offered to teams that advance highway quality in relation to highway design, construction or maintenance, and that could also include financing.

As part of having a state quality initiative, I also chair the State Quality Initiative for TxDOT and we at that level have also had the same type of awards program, and then of course, our champion award programs are then submitted to the national level for the national competition.

And I' m very pleased to announce today that the Houston District, we had submitted a project which was called the Tri-Party Agreement -- and I think Mr. Trietsch talked about it -- which deals with the development of the Katy Freeway project.

The Katy Freeway project is the largest project that has ever been undertaken by the Houston District -- I think I' m correct -- and as such, that project, the reconstruction of the Katy Freeway, involved a lot of elements that have been incorporated into the project. For example, we' re now going to have managed lanes or what I would call HOT lanes on the Katy Freeway, so that required a lot of coordination with Federal Highway Administration because we want to take advantage of some of the tools that are available to us.

So this required also, of course, the project being a major project that required some additional partners and also some additional vision so that the district and the state and of course working with the Harris County Toll Road Authority, the county and of course the city and Metro, looking at how you build something that won' t only be there for today but also be there for the future.

So a Tri-Party Agreement was put in place where Federal Highway Administration, Harris County Toll Road Authority, and TxDOT at the Austin level and the Houston District identified how we could better fund these projects. And of course, Harris County Toll Road Authority provided some additional funding to help the project gain whatever funding we needed, as well as helped with some additional funding that they would allow us to have and use to allow us to develop the project much faster.

This project was submitted under the Partnering category of the "Making a Difference" Award, and I' m happy to see that it received a silver award from the National Partnership for Highway Quality.

I' d like for Gary Trietsch, Judge Eckels, Dan Reagan, and I guess Mr. Behrens, if you could come down so I could present the awards.

MR. WILLIAMSON: For those of you in the audience who don' t recognize Mr. Reagan, he is the Texas -- do we call it a region or division -- Division. Mr. Reagan is the Texas FHWA person with whom we work on all of our transportation projects, and one of the mindsets we' ve tried to develop in the last four years, at the governor' s instruction, is to view the federal government not as our enemy but as our partner, and Dan Reagan has done an outstanding job in accepting that as our way of life. We appreciate Dan being so active in our business.

MR. SAENZ: I will congratulate you on this. Of course, this is not the first award the Houston District has received from the National Partnership for Highway Quality. The State of Texas and especially the Houston District has probably been represented and has been an award-winner for many, many years, so we thank you all.

(Applause.)

MR. NICHOLS: Can I say something?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Mr. Nichols.

MR. NICHOLS: I wanted to add a few more comments related to what just transpired on that award. Shortly after I got on the commission, everyone knew that the Katy Freeway needed to be expanded from end to end, yet there was not the resources or money to do all of it in a reasonable period of time. With the resources we had, the rules and laws that were in place, we were looking at probably a year 2020, possibly a year 2025 completion of that project.

We knew and the people that were just standing up knew that the only way we could get there was some variation of what is now occurring, but in the early stages I know as an observer, as a commissioner I was sometimes called into those meetings, and those people that were just standing up here were faced with overwhelming obstacles. There were state laws that prohibited what is occurring, there were state constitution provisions that prevented what is occurring, there were rules at the federal level, Federal Highway Administration, that prohibited what is occurring, but the direction and the mindset was we are not going to allow that project to wait till 2020 or 2025.

And each time, without fail, they kept their heads together, they kept their cool, they kept the direction, they worked from a statewide perception and a national perception to help change around the direction that the Federal Highway Administration had, that the legislature and its constitution that we lived under, all that was changed through this whole process, and they kept together and kept going.

And I will tell you it is an amazing thing that not only has allowed that project to move so fast on such an accelerated schedule, but helped set the tone for many other projects around the state, kind of became a model. So I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood that. Thanks.

MR. BEHRENS: We' re going to go to item number 5 while we' re waiting for the mayor. Amadeo, if you could come back up here. This is a minute order -- for the audience, this is some of our normal business that the commission takes care of -- this is to present a minute order recommending the appointment of two board members to the Austin-San Antonio Intermunicipal Commuter Rail District. Amadeo?

MR. SAENZ: Thank you. Again, good morning. I' m Amadeo Saenz, assistant executive director for engineering.

For item number 5, the minute order before you appoints two members to the Austin-San Antonio Intermunicipal Commuter Rail District. Article 6515C-1, BTCS allows the establishment of an intermunicipal commuter rail district and grants the powers necessary to provide commuter rail service between the Austin and San Antonio areas. This statute requires the Texas Transportation Commission to appoint two members to the district' s board of directors.

On December 19, 2002, by Minute Order 109121, the commission appointed J. Tullos Wells and Mariano Camarillo to the board of the district for a two-year term. Due to exemplary service of the current commission appointees, staff recommends that the commission appoint Mr. Wells and Mr. Camarillo as members to this district for a second two-year term. The candidates are recommended for your approval.

MR. WILLIAMSON: First of all, let' s explain to our friends in Houston that the Austin-San Antonio Rail Committee that they sit on was set up by the legislature to basically begin the process of seeing how we could establish a commuter line between San Antonio, New Braunfels, San Marcos and Austin. Correct?

MR. SAENZ: That' s correct, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And since that time we' ve looked at not just a new line but actually how we can work with the Union Pacific and maybe even do a business transaction with the Union Pacific if we can get the law changed.

MR. SAENZ: Right. We have been working with the commuter rail district and looking into the possibility of trying to relocate the Union Pacific so that they could also take advantage of trying to utilize some of the footprint that currently is being used by Union Pacific and establish commuter rail.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Same concept that we know is going on here in the Houston area --

MR. SAENZ: Very similar, yes, sir. --

MR. WILLIAMSON:  -- with relocating rail and using the existing footprint to accomplish other purposes.

John, you know Mr. Wells personally. Is he here that you know of?

MR. JOHNSON: I have not seen him.

MR. SAENZ: I don' t believe Mr. Wells is here; Mr. Camarillo is here.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, we wouldn' t want to pass up the chance to grill Mariano. He knew it was coming.

MR. SAENZ: I was going to wait for you to approve him and then ask him to come up, but if you want to grill him, that' s fine.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So just exactly what are you doing to advance the governor' s rail program, Mr. Camarillo?

MR. CAMARILLO: Well, hopefully a lot of positive things. For the record, my name is Mariano Camarillo. I' m a resident of Austin, Texas, a native of San Antonio. I serve with Tullos Wells on the Austin-San Antonio Rail District.

It seems like a very quick two years since the appointment. During that period of time for many of the other fellow members of the board, it was a little bit of an educational process, but we feel we' ve moved rapidly. We' ve employed two different engineering firms at this particular point. In fact, this coming Wednesday, I believe it' s February 2, we will review the feasibility study which is probably one of the more significant milestones of this project to date and will actually begin reviewing things like ridership numbers and some of the alternative rail lines proposed for that Austin-San Antonio rail line.

So that' s the progress that we' ve made. I chair the Project Management Oversight Committee, I also chair the Finance Committee, just doing the things that you asked me to do two years ago and those were to make judicious judgments. I' m carefully looking at not only how we can take advantage of the current stream of federal and state funding, but looking at how we can use our business partners in Austin and San Antonio and all of the metropolitan districts in between there to fund this and hopefully become an integral part of the Trans-Texas Corridor.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I get the pleasure of dialoguing with Mariano because we' ve been friends for about 21 years now. When I was a freshman member of the legislature, this young man was working for Comptroller Bullock at the time, and took me under his wing and taught me a little bit about state budgets and I' ve never forgotten it.

It' s good to see you and we appreciate all your hard work.

MR. CAMARILLO: Thank you very much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Any other questions, members? Hope?

MS. ANDRADE: Mr. Chairman, on behalf of Mr. Tullos Wells, he' s from my hometown and I know him well. We' ve worked on many projects in San Antonio together, and I think the State of Texas and the rail district is fortunate to have Mr. Wells volunteer another two years.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Very good. Thank you.

MR. SAENZ: Staff recommends approval of these recommendations.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Is there a motion?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MS. ANDRADE: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries. Thank you, Amadeo; thank you, Mariano.

(Applause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Mayor, we welcome you, sir. Were you out there operating the wrecker?

MAYOR WHITE: There you go.

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: When I was a freshman in the legislature, he came and chewed on me too.

MAYOR WHITE: And listen, we just love to have you in Houston. I mean, I tell you, members of the commission, a lot of people say I got hired principally to try to find practical ways to enhance mobility in the community -- that' s what the surveys showed -- and I know that' s your mandate across this great state of ours, so it' s great to have partners with TxDOT because we' re going to be graded by a lot of the same people on a lot of the same things.

And I thought I' d share with you just a couple of observations about sort of post mortem some good things that we' ve been doing with TxDOT this last year, and then I' d like to highlight, if I could for you, four issues where we need to put our brains together and we want to be what resource we can for members of the commission and for all the other folks in this community that have been working together on our regional transportation issues.

I' m going to highlight those four things that maybe cause us, if we look back over the last two decades, to say that these are things that in the next two decades will be more of the nature of new challenges. They haven' t just appeared overnight but because of the greater density and the growth and the blessings of our urban area of attracting so many people, we' re going to have to be thinking about some things a little differently.

The first two observations of great effective work that we' ve done together is imagine this: Okay, so I' ve just come into being mayor and Spur 527 which is carrying a lot of the traffic downtown is to undergo renovation. And what you saw at that time -- Gary remembers this -- nightly stories on every broadcast channel saying that basically Houston was going to fall apart and neighborhoods would be destroyed, the entire 610 was going to fall apart and neighborhoods inside 610.

We didn' t bash TxDOT, we worked constructively with TxDOT together on a plan that involved things like changing an exit so there would be more exit opportunities, communications with those responsible for local government. We convened all the station managers, all the publishers, had daily meetings with traffic reporters and others so that people knew in advance what the preferred commuting alternatives were, brought TTI in to review what we' d done, and constantly improved.

We were improving signage throughout the first week based on what I saw from the helicopter and what other people were looking at, and it was some said the biggest non-story of last year, even though, as you know, it was a major undertaking if you' re talking about 40,000 people coming into the city of Houston where you' re decreasing the number of lanes coming in.

We did it because we worked together, we did it constructively, looking at the solution. There was one little, I guess, hiccup that didn' t have to do with regional but it sure would have been nice if we would have had a few more of the heavy trucks that we could have helped during peak periods find alternative routes that would have increased public safety and mobility where TxDOT Legal had a little issue. But on 99 percent of the things that we tried to do together, we were successful.

Second example, not much publicized, but TxDOT, an enormous undertaking, you know, on that Katy Freeway improvement which is proceeding on a construction schedule which has been kept on schedule by your excellent professionals within this TxDOT region.

We had a problem when you' re narrowing lanes in one of the most congested areas and you don' t have shoulders and even if you had shoulders, if you' re narrowing lanes, it was critical that we do incident management right on that. That' s where we started the Safe Clear Program back in I guess it was March that coincided with when the lanes were narrowed during the construction of that segment where vehicles were removed quickly so we wouldn' t have traffic backed up for miles and miles.

We sat with the people who were doing it, reorganized the way we did towing on that particular part of the freeway. The traffic reporters and others, they' re just commuters, saw that the disaster that was predicted when we narrowed the lanes did not occur, in part because we did a much better job of incident management on the freeways which ultimately gave us what was a pilot program for what we could do better on our freeways, all done with TxDOT. And what the people thought would be a disaster, we changed it to something where actually you had traffic moving at some times of the day faster than it used to be, because of the incident management, with fewer lanes.

So I give you that as a spirit of cooperation what we can accomplish that' s in all of our interest who are mobility advocates if we work towards a solution and make changes as we go along to try to adjust in real time and not get defensive and take advantage of the power of local government and local government officials to work with you and to mobilize the community.

Now, if I could, let me just say one lesson from that that' s a generic lesson is flexibility, and I commend TxDOT and those who give the TxDOT district a lot of flexibility, because I want to tell you they have respect from the professionals. Mr. Trietsch is known as a straight-shooter. We' ve disagreed on some things but we' ve always had that good working relationship, and I think if we have empowerment of our local transportation professionals like Gary and Art Story and Mark Marcot and others that work with us, some of the professionals at Metro, and we tell them what we want to accomplish, we will find that they can come up with some of the budget allocations and the ordering of priorities that we need within this particular region.

Now, here' s the four points that I' d like to make new and different. We have a lot of traffic on these freeways and TxDOT funded and participated in major thoroughfares within our community. We can' t defer maintenance, we need our fair share of maintenance funding -- by fair share I' m not saying some quoted, that' s not what I' m saying. What I' m saying is that when it comes to maintenance funding, we need to use objective criteria that are based upon need, just as the type of businesslike approach that I know the governor has advocated, that I have advocated within this.

We' re having the number of heavy trucks increasing even faster than the number of automobiles, and as you know, for an area of the state where we increased job growth at a higher percentage rate than the other major urban areas, and in absolute terms, we' re a growing community; we want to grow. And so none of the mobility issues, if we do nothing, they' re going to get worse, if we do nothing, if we don' t improve and we don' t add capacity and do some of the other things that I' m talking about.

But the preservation program, I don' t know whether it' s true or not but there' s some lore of things based on lane miles. Well, there are some lane miles that are used more than other lane miles, and the heavy truck traffic and other traffic we get, there' s a direct function in the amount of maintenance that we' ll need based on that. And if we use some principles in allocating that within the TxDOT districts and among TxDOT districts that are based on the kind of objective criteria that would lead to the maintenance needs, we need to do a better job, I' d say, throughout our public infrastructure.

I know I' ll take responsibility on city streets. Too often maintenance has not been enough compared to the construction, and I would say if TxDOT helps us and takes a look at that so that we maintain what we have and we expend, those are going to be some of the best dollars that we expended. And preventive maintenance is far less disruptive than if you have a major problem that you have to come in and correct.

Second, I' ll use some jargon that you' re familiar with but then plain words too, intelligent transportation systems, Transtar, and I look at it this way, that we have this remarkable public investment in our paved infrastructure in this community. Replacement costs, I don' t know what it would be, commissioners, $100 billion? I mean, an unbelievable $40 million it cost.

And just how I put this by analogy, I used to do a lot of work in the refining petrochemical business, our company serviced some of those firms, and I' ll tell you the best money spent was optimization of the capital expenditure within those industries, and industry after industry it' s found that the best money spent is optimizing the use of that large capital investment.

That means that everything from -- and I get a little credit for, we' ve retimed most of the traffic signals in the city of Houston in a period of one year based on optimization programs. There' s two corridors that are right next to where we are right now, the Westheimer corridor and the Richmond corridor, and studies that we did that TTI helped design showed that in that signal optimization we reduced the peak traffic by 17 percent; the time of peak traffic commute in that corridor from the Beltway to 610 by 17 percent, non-peak by 14 percent by looking at the optimization of the signal timing.

And this broader lesson is that what we do to manage the traffic on these things that we' ve built is a very high return on the investment in the public, and it gets higher and higher as the alternative of lane expansion in a built environment gets more and more costly. Do you see what I' m saying? Costly in terms of right of way easement, costly in terms of disruption of existing patterns, costly in terms of destruction of neighborhoods.

So the monies that we spend managing on that infrastructure is so critically important, and the safety of the people along that infrastructure. We have an obligation. Probably everybody in this room has been touched in their life by somebody in their family or somebody who is a friend or loved one who has gotten hurt out there.

So when we talk about programs to ensure compliance with traffic rules and regulations and removing vehicles to where people can be hit, that' s all part of the obligation we think we have to manage that traffic and mobility on the existing infrastructure.

And when there are incidents on that infrastructure, the TTI and others and other organizations in other states can give you the statistics about the extreme congestion that is caused by that, and that is a huge cause of congestion. Just listen to the drive-time radio in the morning and you' ll understand where the congestion is that' s where the wrecked or stalled vehicles are. And usually there is a cause, when there is a wreck, often that is caused by something else that is happening on that freeway that causes people to back up and take their eye off or traffic to stop moving suddenly, and that' s what we' re trying to address.

Now, when we deal with the Transtar program, there is a meeting that we' ve had and the continuing discussions between Metro, TxDOT, the county, the city, how should we within this region then go about managing the signalization and optimization of signalization. It is really a regional issue when you come to think about it, and it affects the infrastructure that we all have a responsibility for.

I' m not going to prejudge what that is, I know that there are good professionals working on it, but I know what it' s not. It can' t be that you just turn it over to one jurisdiction or another jurisdiction and say here' s your baby. I think we all have an interest in making sure that this is properly funded and managed and probably with something that transcends just the boundary of one local jurisdiction.

Yes, you' ve heard me say it. I' m not one of these people coming up and saying give the city this. What I' m saying is that we' ve got to organize this regionally and put it on a system of funding which is sustainable and have somebody in charge that' s accountable to it, and I think that' s what the professionals at all levels think we ought to be doing, and I think you' ll be seeing some plans and proposals that come up through that process involving the local entities.

And I would ask you to be supportive of the consensus reached among the local professionals concerning the best way we go about managing funding that program.

Third issue I' ll raise is just -- well, I' ve already raised it once before -- incident management, what we do in order to make sure that the arteries are safe, that people aren' t backed up in traffic, that there' s not miles of rubbernecking. And some of it also has to do with this safety/traffic congestion. If you go through on the built infrastructure, how you manage that, you see that some of the same things that impair safety are also the same things that cause congestion. And let me give you an example of that.

Right out here, not far from where we' re sitting, is -- I don' t know what they call it, Gary, the number one most congested exchange, 610/59 interchange. We made a tremendous improvement, TxDOT did that, I was blessed to be at at the beginning of the year where there was one where we went from South Post Oak. Talk to anybody in town and all you have to do is say have you ever been stuck at this place, and everybody will raise their hand.

Well, there are some things about that, let me just give you an example of it. And I' m not telling you I know the solution but I' ll just give you an example of the type of creative things that is both the biggest cause of accidents and the biggest cause of congestion, non-accident related congestion, and that is you have a bunch of people changing lanes within a fairly short period of time. And traffic engineers throughout this world have developed systems where people commit to a lane and then you don' t have as much doing what all of us have done.

Have you ever taken a car and nosed in front of another car because your lane isn' t moving as fast and tried to get into that lane and watched it? Well, when you' re nosing that car into that other lane, trying to get across that lane, then that backs up traffic. And then if you' re like me, as soon as you get in there, the lane you' re in starts moving.

(General laughter.)

MAYOR WHITE: But this is not just anecdotal. Through helicopter observations of this and modeling of it by TTI, it is demonstrated that if you can have some systems and procedures -- maybe it' s not cones, maybe it' s what they have done in other places; Dubai, for example, uses things you can pull up in the lane markers, instead of getting on and then they have to cross five lanes within one mile to get off, have to make the mature decision that you' re going to have to commit to a lane or get on a little earlier.

That' s the kind of common sense thing that we need to be thinking about. Does that mean that changes like that will occur without question or controversy? Of course not. I had an uncle and aunt who refused to ever ride a plane because they were that way, they didn' t want to change.

But we' ve got to manage these freeways and major thoroughfares and streets in a way that allows us to use these great facilities designed by great people in the best public interest, and we ought to be thinking together of ways to get things done. And for people who say you can' t do this or that, then ask them for ideas so that we can use common sense approaches to addressing this issue.

I' ll tell you this, we put a lot on economic development. The congestion that is in about one mile of the radius of where you are right now, if you take the one mile to the west and you take this place along the freeway, real estate values and commercial activities have stagnated in parts of this area, certainly commercial office buildings, because of the mobility issues created by the high level of congestion on the Westheimer corridor and the 610/59 corridor. What we do to move this traffic along and take practical measures will make a real difference.

Finally, I really appreciate the attention and leadership given to this body and others in the community to freight rail. Monthly I talk to the chairman of the Surface Transportation Board of the United States. We have over 700 at-grade rail crossings within this city, 700 at-grade rail crossings in this city, some right by major thoroughfares. You take an exit from here, you take a left under the overpass right here, and head down there and you' ll run into one of them that' s right where you have trains going right at grade in a major commuting thoroughfare within this city.

Now, I' m not saying you start there. There' s others actually on a cost-effective basis. But the work led by George Demontrond and the Mobility Partners group that involves the other regional authorities, a good working relationship with the other county judges in this area, and at the professional level by Art Story at the county to come up with a practical rail plan that we can include in the TEA transportation. I know that TxDOT is providing some of the funding for that study.

Congressman DeLay and I, in a joint meeting with the heads of our two major rail carriers and others who were professionals, including a TxDOT representative, last November, the majority leader was pretty clear about the deadlines that our region needed to meet in order to get the federal funding request in there, and has a real commitment. I' ve met with him since that time to evaluate the progress of that.

This is a fast time deadline we' re talking about; we need to work together. If we look at what we' ve done in Chicago -- which you have been well briefed on, I' m sure -- they have something within this same TEA appropriations bill that is along the lines that people have been talking about within the city, both taking a use, Commissioner, with those existing rail corridors and seeing what you can do with those rail corridors, moving one of the corridors that may need extended capacity out of some of the more densely residential areas and freeing that segment for commuter rail, removing some of the bottlenecks that we have.

We have trains parking across our city streets regularly, every day, major streets because they say there are bottlenecks within that system. Some of it is railroad accountability which we' re working on a little bit with the members of Congress and just the way they do their operations, but some of it is designing the system so that we optimize the flow of traffic, don' t create a safety hazard for our citizens. And those kind of enhancements will not come free.

On behalf of the local government entities, we' ve had some talk within the county and city, the participation, the rails will participate, we' ll have federal funding. As in Illinois their local participation was almost all state participation but we' re not just pushing it at the state level that we come up with a plan with multiple funding sources in order to promote rail safety, make available commuting corridors for the future within our city, and continue to keep our traffic moving.

Thank you so much for being with us here today.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Mayor.

Members, questions or comments?

MR. JOHNSON: I have an observation. Mayor, thank you for being here and thank you for an enlightened approach to some of what I would call commonsensical and entrepreneurial issues that face the mobility challenges that we have in this community and communities like this across this state and many other places in the country.

One of the ironies is the at-grade crossing that you referred to by going out the building, getting on the frontage road and turning left, I was stopped this morning on my way here by not one but two trains making a crossing there, and so I' m very familiar, as are a lot of my neighbors, with that.

My observation is this, and then I have a question I want to ask Mike Behrens about one of your points.

I believe that what you present here that TxDOT, and from my experiences, that the other partners in the community will be very eager to work together to solve because I think we' re all of us in the same boat. And by working together -- I' m being repetitious of something I said earlier -- I think we can solve these challenges and add a dimension of a commonsensical, entrepreneurial approach that is not something that requires a lot of high-technology or rocket science or great piles of money to solve, that we just look at situations and figure out a way to solve these incidences and everything else that occurs on our major corridors that we can go a long way to doing some of these things.

I think statistically the numbers that you report in the Richmond corridor, the improvement in traffic flow just by doing the light-timing, I think that' s an example of things that can be done here and everywhere.

Mike, the first point the mayor brought up had to do with our preservation plan, and I remember at the meeting that it was presented we talked about the use of lane miles being one of the drivers of that, and the observation that I made that a lane mile on I-10 in Colorado County compared to a lane mile in Bexar or Harris County is not a fair comparison because of the amount of traffic and the type of traffic that goes over it, and I believe you agreed wit that.

And also we talked about the safety issues that the mayor alluded to and are also a factor in a lot of our preservation decisions. My recollection was that we were going to start using pavement scores more and more as a driver in the determination of our preservation plans. Are we indeed doing that? Have we started that process?

MR. BEHRENS: We haven' t actually implemented or used that formula in distributing funds, but we are looking at pavement scores. Of course we looked at, as the mayor alluded to, the impact of trucks, and of course, unfortunately we have more and more trucks across the state of Texas. We' re looking at, of course, rainfall and all of those things.

But where we' re having good success is with our pavement scores in other parts of the state that will give us a chance to redistribute to maybe where we' re having more problems. And I think like we had discussed earlier, we' ll be using that as some of our criteria.

MAYOR WHITE: Thank you.

MR. JOHNSON: Thank you, Mayor.

MAYOR WHITE: And I appreciate your comment, Mr. Commissioner.

And if I could, before concluding, there was one note here that I think we had polled a lot of -- I' m not just speaking for the city, I asked for input from a lot of different organizations and entities because I know the influence of this body. And it' s sort of like, I don' t know, I thought maybe I shouldn' t talk about this because it really doesn' t directly affect the commission, it has to do with the Toll Road Authority which has been taking some heat and the city doesn' t run it, but I just want to use this as an illustration.

We need the different legal entities, TxDOT, the county, the city, Metro, others, and I know the professional leadership and those who are knowledgeable such as you understand it, but sometimes we need to improve the understanding of the political leadership, and maybe opinion leaders as well, that mobility is our mandate, and that a dollar expended by, let' s say, a toll road authority to reduce congestion in a toll corridor, if it' s cost-effective, that makes sense, that a dollar expended to optimize the utilization of a TxDOT-funded infrastructure makes sense, that every time a mass transit can remove one percent of the commutes along a heavily congested corridor, the marginal impact of that can be very considerable for something that operates at capacity.

In some of the meetings that we' ve been having and the traffic professionals and managers have been explaining things -- and I won' t give a specific case -- I know, for example, both on the 45 and 290 considerations, we broke through some loggerheads when we thought through well what would be the first thing that we did if it was based upon mobility criteria. That might not always be the first thing that' s planned to be done because people perceive within their funding silos that they must do this or that or the other thing.

Too often we will increase capacity before we remove the bottleneck. You know that you can make congestion wider by increasing lane miles without increasing the exit capacity, but if you were going to do it by engineering criteria, you' d look first where there was the bottleneck and then you would build backwards. That' s not always done.

And if we think about how in each of our entities we fund regional plans that are based upon the highest mobility scoring, then I think we will be so much better off and a benefit to me, and you' re being accountable for mobility. We have places in town -- I tell you I hear it every day -- where people are shocked that they' re actually seeing a reduction in congestion.

The traffic reporter, the person on one of the highest-rated TV stations two days ago saying how' s it going in the newsroom. Well, on the traffic reports these days we' re constantly improving the Safe Clear Program, and you hear about but it' s gotten a lot slower because of the lack of wrecks and traffic backups through rubbernecking, and citizens are noticing that too, even some people who have some constructive criticism of the program, and the same thing happened with traffic signals.

If we do things that people can see and touch and feel, then those of us who are mobility advocates and all of what we work for is going to be so much better. Thank you very much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Other questions or comments for the mayor?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I want to thank you for working with us so closely over the last year or so. You' ve been a real pleasure. I think you' re doing an outstanding job down here, and we stand ready to help you any time.

MAYOR WHITE: Thank you, sir, and thank you all for being here.

(Applause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: For many of you in the audience, you have attended to witness this portion of the meeting. What we' re going to do is take a 15-minute break and then we' re going to come back and go through what we refer to as our normal or regular agenda that may or may not be of interest to you. If you want to learn a little bit about how state government makes billion-dollar decisions, well, you can come back and watch; if you don' t, we want to thank you for being with us this morning, we hope you' ve learned something.

We shall return from our break in 15 minutes.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: We will return from our short recess and proceed with department business. Mr. Behrens.

MR. BEHRENS: We' ll start with agenda item number 3 which is our rules portion of the agenda, and we' ll have agenda item 3(a) which is a rule for proposed adoption, and this is in the area of Management, and I' ll ask Richard Monroe, our general counsel, to present that.

MR. MONROE: Good morning, commissioners. For the record, my name is Richard Monroe, general counsel for the department.

If you approve this minute order, you will approve for publication and for public comment a proposed rule setting up an advisory committee for the corridor, the Trans-Texas Corridor. The makeup of the committee is set out on page 1 of 7 of Exhibit B, along with its purposes and the duration which will be at the pleasure of the commission, or not beyond the completion of the Trans-Texas Corridor, as set out on page 6 of 7.

Once again, this will be for publication for public comment. I would recommend approval of the minute order.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I think not so much commission members but the public that' s interested in this approach, just so we kind of understand the flow of events, if we approve the minute order, we' ll send it out and what we' ll in effect be asking the Corridor Watch, the River of Trade, the mayor of Georgetown, the mayor of Dallas, we' ll be asking them to comment on how they think we should set the advisory committee up.

MR. MONROE: Yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And you' ll be taking input from commission members as well.

MR. MONROE: Along with anyone else in the public who cares to comment.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So during the next 30 days, what we' ll be doing is I guess we' d even take suggestions from other government officials and the media and whoever else might care to comment about it.

MR. MONROE: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, questions or comments, discussion with Mr. Monroe about this, members?

Someone asked me in the last day or two, Richard, what I saw the time frame as being, and I told them I couldn' t speak for the commission but that it was my hope that we would get something adopted pretty quick and move forward. It would be possible, would it not, to get our final rules adopted and perhaps even committee members appointed before the end of the legislative session?

MR. MONROE: Oh, yes, sir, I would certainly hope for that.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Do I have a motion?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MR. JOHNSON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. MONROE: Thank you.

MR. BEHRENS: We' ll go to agenda item 3(b)(1) which will be rules for final adoption, and we' ll start out with, again, some rules on Management and Contract Management. Richard?

MR. MONROE: Yes. Speaking of publishing for public comment, we' re now concerned here with final adoption of rules which have been published for comment. Now, no comments were received on these rules.

What these rules do is establish procedures for the cases that come before our own Contract Appeals Claims Committee. The rules were necessitated both by a recent court decision of the Texas Supreme Court, and frankly, some of our experiences over the years that showed us that we needed to tighten some things up.

I would recommend approval of the minute order approving the rules as they were published.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Any witnesses on this one?

MR. BEHRENS: No, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, members, questions or comments of Mr. Monroe?

MR. NICHOLS: The only comment I had -- which is not to Mr. Monroe -- is that the contractor claims process that the Department of Transportation has is probably one of the best in the nation. It' s solved a lot of problems without a lot of litigation and it' s been a great system, so the fact that we did not receive any objectionable comments from the contracting industry tells me they' re satisfied also with the process.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Good. Anything else, members?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do I have a motion?

MR. JOHNSON: So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion, signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. MONROE: Thank you, commissioners.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Mr. Monroe.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item 3(b)(2) are also rules for final adoption, and these are in the area of Contracting for Architectural, Engineering and Surveying Services, and will be presented by Mark Marek.

MR. MAREK: Good morning, Mr. Behrens, commissioners. For the record, my name is Mark Marek; I' m the director of the Design Division for TxDOT.

This minute order adopts amendments to Sections 9.30 through 9.39, 9.41 and 9.42, and New Section 9.43, and the Repeal of 9.40 and the old 9.43 to revise the procurement of Architectural, Engineering and Surveying Services.

These changes do not significantly change the procurement process externally to the firms interested in doing business with TxDOT. The major revision to the rules is the removal of the pre-certification work categories. These categories will be posted on the department' s website instead. Subsequent changes to the work categories for our firms will be made through Texas Transportation Commission minute order will which allow for public comment.

Also, these amendments increase contract limitations where population growth has resulted in the addition of districts to the definition of Metropolitan Districts. The amendments to Section 9.39(a)(3) add a procedure for an emergency selection process.

One comment was received from industry relating to the amended Section 9.34(b)(1) concerning the disqualification of a firm where there is knowledge that the firm or an employee of the firm has a record of unprofessional conduct, including but not limited to whether the firm or an employee has been sanctioned for a violation of rules of the licensing board.

The comment acknowledged the right of the department to disqualify the proposer in the case of a breach of ethical or professional obligation. They raised questions about the firm' s ability to perform appropriately on a project contract. However, the broad nature of the proposed language was questioned with respect to having a technical violation of licensing rules by a single individual to cause the entire firm to be disqualified.

It should be noted that the proposed language is a permissive condition. A firm may indeed have an individual with a technical violation with respect to the rules of the licensing board and still be a qualified firm to do business with TxDOT.

Even though it is not the department' s intent to subject an entire firm to disqualification for a single individual' s technical violation of licensing rules, there can be instances where the position of the individual within the firm and their actions in representing the firm make the disqualification decision appropriate with respect to the firm' s ability to perform appropriately on a project contract.

While the department must exercise reasonable judgment, the department needs the flexibility represented by the language in this section to determine the firm' s qualifications to enter into future contracts and perform appropriately on those contracts. Therefore, no change to these amended rules as originally proposed are recommended.

Staff recommends approval of this minute order.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments, members?

MR. JOHNSON: A question, Mark. I' m assuming or I' m interpreting by what you said that the comment that was received actually is handled in the fact that the language says that it allows us to disqualify and does not say that we shall disqualify.

MR. MAREK: Yes, Commissioner Johnson, that is correct.

MR. JOHNSON: Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Other questions or comments, members?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Mark, I' ve got a couple. Could anyone argue after final passage of this that we' ve done anything that will diminish the ability of smaller engineering or surveying firms to compete directly with TxDOT for their business?

MR. MAREK: No, sir, I do not believe it will.

MR. WILLIAMSON: What' s the breakdown on dollar basis? Do you happen to know between, say, the ten firms we do the most business with in the engineering area and everyone else in the state as far as percentage of the state' s money?

MR. MAREK: No, sir, I do not. I can pass that information on to you through some research.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Is that something you' ve got handy, Amadeo?

MR. SAENZ: [Inaudible.]

MR. WILLIAMSON: Send each commissioner, if you would -- before the next meeting, take the ten largest firms each year for the last five years by dollar volume paid and then give us a percentage of total dollars, and that will be sufficient.

We have passed a lot of rules lately, the last year, having to do with consultants, and we have a legislative item that has to do with consultants, and I' m a little bit curious about some basic information that I need to have and I suspect the public might want to know about as far as the relationship between that money and those firms and how that changes over time.

MR. MAREK: We can certainly do that, Mr. Chairman.

MR. NICHOLS: In relationship to what you just asked and clarifying that, you' re referring to dollars issued on contracts or actual billing?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Which would you recommend?

MR. NICHOLS: I would think the actual contracts issued, and not the notice to proceed and not the actual billed but the actual total dollar on the contract would probably be the best way to go.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I just don' t want to give the impression in passing rules that we' re either favoring or somehow punishing or hurting those firms -- and I' m of the impression that those ten firms probably do most of the business with us. I don' t want to give the impression we' re favoring them or that we' re damaging them at this moment in time.

MR. MAREK: Well, there was certainly no intention of the staff in working on these rules to favor in any way.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Any other questions or comments, members?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do I have a motion?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MS. ANDRADE: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. MAREK: Thank you.

MR. BEHRENS: We have agenda item 3(b)(3) which is final rules concerning Right of Way and Utility Accommodation. John Campbell.

MR. CAMPBELL: Good morning. For the record, my name is John Campbell, director of the Right of Way Division.

And as I understand it, this item is going to be deferred for action by the commission. I' ll present it for your edification only, not for your consideration.

This minute order, item 3(b)(3) provides for the repeal of 43 TAC Sections 21.31 through 21.51 relating to Utility Accommodation, and proposes the final adoption of New Sections 21.31 through 21.51 of the same title.

This represents the first comprehensive update of the Utility Accommodation rules of TxDOT since 1993, so it has been a long-term and arduous undertaking.

The amendments were necessary to reorganize the rules for clarity, to allow for the use of updated utility construction methods and materials, and improve the state' s management of its real property right of way assets by, first of all, encouraging a better quality of utility plans for incorporation onto the TxDOT right of way, and secondly, to help us improve the accuracy of the location information for these facilities as built.

The basic chronology of the process that we' ve gone through in dialogue with industry and other interested parties on this spans about two years to this point. This first came up for our addressing to change the Utility Accommodation rules at the same time that we were going through the Access Management effort, and at that time we heard and understood the commission' s desire that we attempt a more open process of advising industry of what our intentions were.

So we conducted a series of regional forums with the utility industry in which we set out to tell them here' s our first draft of what we propose to do, and at that time allowed them to comment and give us some suggestions as to the changes they' d like to see.

We then arrived at our normal rules process, and at the October commission meeting we passed preliminary approval of this set of rules. We' ve now had the opportunity to continue to hear a lot of concerned discussion from the utility industry basically over what are we going to do and how are we going to incorporate the various features of their comments.

So I think that we' ve had a serendipitous occasion to continue to make sure that we do the best job of incorporating industry input, so we' re supportive of the fact that we' re deferring action on this until we can be even more confident that we' ve fully incorporated public comment.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We have some witnesses, John, but I want to ask you a few questions before I bring them up.

MR. CAMPBELL: Certainly.

MR. WILLIAMSON: What' s different between the comments they' re offering now and the comments that they offered during the time period you were attempting to solicit their comments?

MR. CAMPBELL: I don' t think there' s anything really fundamentally different about the comments; they devolve into just a couple of categories: the first is always the concern that we' re going to impose undue additional cost on the utility.

MR. WILLIAMSON: By making them do what?

MR. CAMPBELL: Excuse me?

MR. WILLIAMSON: By making them do what? Your statement was we' re imposing undue additional costs. How?

MR. CAMPBELL: By the impression that we' re going to raise the standard, particularly that we would require an engineer' s signature and seal on utility plans. These rules include a provision in which we may require up to that level of professional certification of the plans, but the intent was more towards the end of us certifying the actual location of these things.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Who would acquire the engineer for that certification, us or them?

MR. CAMPBELL: It would be the utility. The utility responsible for designing the facilities would also be responsible for securing the engineer that would develop those plans.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And would that hold true of the surveyor as well?

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes, sir.

In the case that TxDOT would reimburse or be a participant to the cost of these things, we do now and have historically incurred those costs as eligible, so that if a utility had to design the plans and they had to hire a professional engineer to do it, that' s an eligible cost for our participation. So we' re not imposing a standard unequally, we would have the same standard when we are paying as when the utility industry is paying.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, we' ll have another shot at John here in just a second, but members, do you have any questions or comments with John right now?

MS. ANDRADE: I have a question for John. When we receive comments from the industry, what do we do with those? Does that start a dialogue between us and them?

MR. CAMPBELL: Well, actually in the formal process, yes. We receive the comments and then we go through the effort of actually trying to address the substance of those comments. In this case we also held an additional public forum during the comment period so that we could get also face-to-face input.

The dialogue that you referred to really occurred and started with the utility industry after those early initial informal meetings. So we had had a dialogue but obviously the interest is still building and probably the awareness of it is still building, too, in the industry.

MS. ANDRADE: And we started this two years ago?

MR. CAMPBELL: It was about two years ago, I think December of > 03 when we first started our series of informal sessions.

MR. NICHOLS: Just for the public more than us, the intent of this rule, even though we' re going to defer it today, is so that we will know where the utility is in the right of way.

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes, sir.

MR. NICHOLS: And the question really becomes -- it' s a simple request to know where it is, but the implementation of that request is really where the concern is from the utility companies.

MR. CAMPBELL: Absolutely.

MR. NICHOLS: So I' ll wait till I hear their comments.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So prior to the adoption of this rule, we had utilities in the right of way owned by the people that we didn' t know where they were.

MR. CAMPBELL: That' s the case, yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And is there any linkage between liability and insurance claims or culpability in requiring the engineer' s or surveyor' s or architect' s stamp?

MR. CAMPBELL: I think that it imposes, perhaps, the misunderstanding of what we' re attempting to do. Let me explain.

When we require an engineer' s seal, the impression is that we' re attending to manner in which you design the facility, the industry standards for that, and that' s where it could be confusing.

The intent of us laying that out as a standard which we might go up to was not for us to try to say we know better than industry what the safe conditions of installation are, but to say that with that industry standard as a minimum standard, TxDOT may impose stricter standards towards the end of protecting our facilities, protecting our right of way, or being able to identify and manage what' s in our right of way.

So the confusion was that when we start to say that we' re going to require an engineering seal that we' re suddenly stepping into the shoes of the utility and saying that we know better than the utility how you should construct this facility. Not the intent but definitely the impression.

MR. HOUGHTON: So the seal is going to guarantee that you know where the utility is or the pipes, the wires.

MR. CAMPBELL: I think as a practical measure, a certification probably more likely by a surveyor gives TxDOT what we intend to get, and that' s a more accurate, a more reliable indication of where we are in three-dimensional space. So the seal, no, would not do that.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So is it the case that the person holding the seal is probably more competent than the person who is not holding the seal, and so you wish to require the seal in order to achieve a level of competency?

MR. CAMPBELL: No. I think the desire to require the seal would be to say that let' s raise this set of plans to that level of quality because typically it' s going to be a more formal review process if an engineer has to put his signature and seal on a set of utility plans and currently the practice does not -- it' s utility by utility determined whether they develop their plans with an engineering seal or whether they do something less controlled.

MR. HOUGHTON: We' re talking about all utilities. We' re talking about municipal utilities; we' re talking about public-private utilities. So in a municipal water utility, instead of having their internal engineers, they would have to go hire an outside engineer and put his stamp on that set of plans?

MR. CAMPBELL: The rule as currently proposed would allow TxDOT to impose the standard up to requiring an engineer' s seal.

MR. HOUGHTON: That' s my point. So if we impose that rule and that utility has to go hire an engineer, outside engineer --

MR. CAMPBELL: If they had engineers in-house, they could utilize them.

MR. HOUGHTON: Well, most utilities do have engineers in-house. So the seal from an engineer in-house is adequate versus one that is outside?

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And I wouldn' t want you to construe the questions, John, as being the commission' s expression of disagreeing with the recommendation; we' re just trying to understand the different permutations of the argument.

Richard, did you have something to add to it?

MR. MONROE: Yes, sir. You expressed a concern about questions of liability and such. What we' re trying to get here is if we feel it' s in the best interest of the public and in the best interest of the department to require such an engineering seal, as far as the questions of liability, particularly to the department, and for that matter, the utility, the court decisions in the state give very broad discretion to professional engineers doing this sort of thing.

So yes, requiring that in the appropriate situations definitely has a positive effect on our liability and I would submit the utility' s liability.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay.

Amadeo, you' re familiar with the procurement of services. If our rules were to be altered such that the utility had to give us notice of when they were finished and we secured the surveyor or the engineer or the architect to certify the plans, how would we go about hiring that engineer?

MR. SAENZ: We have to follow the Professional Service Act to bring onboard the surveyor or the engineer, so we would go through our engineering procurement process that we have in place, the process that Mark Marek explained a little while ago.

And it' s a two-step process where we go out there and we would request letters of interest and then review those letters of interest, conduct interviews, if needed, and then we would select a firm based on qualifications. Once we have selected the firm on qualifications, then we will go out there and negotiate the fee with the firm that was selected.

If by some chance we cannot negotiate a fee with that firm that was selected, then we can step down to the second firm that was selected and do the same thing. We would have to end negotiations with the first firm, and once we end negotiations with the first firm, we could not go back to them.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, hold that thought for a second. John, do you mind waiting and let us hear from the witnesses?

MR. CAMPBELL: Not at all.

MR. SAENZ: I would like to just maybe try to elaborate a little bit on John' s. What we' re trying to do with the utility rules is we want to be able to get what we would call an as-built set of plans. Because what usually happens in the installation of utilities, as the utility is being placed, even though we have a permit that says that this utility is on the two-foot line, two feet from the right of way line, sometimes it does not get placed there for reasons that maybe they run into a conflict.

And what we' re trying to accomplish with the rules is that we would like to have an as-built set of plans that would give us the location of that utility, both horizontally and vertically, so that we can have an idea of exactly where it is, we know now what happens in the future. And what the rules basically require at least a certification but up to an engineering seal. An engineering seal in itself is a certification, but we could get a certification from a surveyor or an engineer from the company.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So what the department desires is an as-built as opposed to an as-planned.

MR. SAENZ: Correct, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Right now we have a seal as-planned because that' s the law.

MR. SAENZ: Right. Well, some of our utility permits do not come sealed because they' re done internal, especially the installations for telecommunications I don' t believe have engineer' s seals on them because those are done internal by the companies themselves.

What we' re looking for and what we want in the certification is basically where did you place this line.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Stand by a second.

Diane Barlow.

MS. BARLOW: Good morning, commissioners. My name is Diane Barlow; I' m an attorney with the firm of Casey, Gentz & Magness. And I am here today representing a coalition of communications carriers. Those carriers include Level 3 communications, Qwest, Time Warner Telecom, Above Net, McLeod, XO Communications, Xspedius, and members of the Texas Telecom and Cable Association. I certainly do appreciate the opportunity to address the commission.

The companies I represent provide vital communication services to Texans, and since 1996 -- which is when Congress deregulated the telecommunications market -- we have seen enormous changes in the communications environment. There have been significant advances in technology and certainly lower prices, both of which have greatly benefited consumers.

The companies that I represent are spending millions of dollars to install new infrastructure, to upgrade existing infrastructure, to conquer the digital divide. And we know that' s become a cliche but that is all about bringing advanced services to Texans and particularly rural areas of Texas.

You' re probably aware the legislature has mandated, has told us it is a policy of this state to promote the advancement of advanced services, and we particularly want you to serve those citizens who live outside of our metropolitan areas.

Now, we recognize that the infrastructure necessary to provide these advanced services has brought challenges both to those of us that use the rights of way and to TxDOT and others that manage the public rights of way. We, however, are committed to working with TxDOT in a cooperative relationship to make it a win-win situation, and it truly is mutually beneficial for industry and TxDOT to work together to promote both the delivery of communication services and to minimize the impact on the public rights of way and other facilities that occupy those rights of way.

On balance, the proposed amendments that you have before you are reasonable. We have participated in discussions with the department for about 14 months, I guess it' s been, since December of 2003. We' ve discussed them with staff, we' ve had input, and as I said, on balance we believe that these are good regulations and we support their adoption, with one exception, and that' s the PE seal requirement -- no surprises there.

MR. NICHOLS: Which requirement?

MS. BARLOW: The professional engineering seal requirement -- I' ve already started talking in shorthand terms, the PE seal requirement, not physical education in this case but professional engineering.

(General laughter.)

MS. BARLOW: But the latter might be a better idea.

It does represent a significant economic burden, and we recognize that it is not mandated as a requirement, but we are concerned that even the discretion at the district level to impose a requirement will add costs to projects, will create delay.

There is a federal law that requires all state and political subdivisions of a state to treat telecommunications providers on a competitively neutral and non-discriminatory basis. Well, I see that as a slippery slope once you start delegating discretion to district directors in this area because if they' re going to require that SBC put seals on their records but not ComCast, is that competitively neutral? I see that there' s going to be potential problems.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, is ComCast in a right of way?

MS. BARLOW: Oh, yes, which leads me to --

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, why wouldn' t we require it of ComCast as well?

MS. BARLOW: Well, there is the concern as to just how it would be applied, and our concern is that as a default it will be applied to everyone, and that is, the significant cost that then would be --

MR. WILLIAMSON: The engineering community would like that.

MS. BARLOW: Yes, it might be full employment for the professional engineers.

MR. WILLIAMSON: This falls under the same category as the conversation I had with Mark a while ago, and that is, I don' t want to give the impression that we' re passing rules that either result in additional employment for engineers or perceived to be punitive of them because we' re attempting to bring some competitive balance into the engineering world in our legislative package.

MS. BARLOW: And we understand the challenges.

MR. WILLIAMSON: If I was a normal Houstonian out there watching this I would think it looks like they' re passing a rule to guarantee engineers have more work.

MS. BARLOW: Well, I don' t think that' s fair, I don' t think that that is the intent.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Are you familiar with any of the companies that you represent?

MS. BARLOW: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do they not have these engineers on staff, or would our rule not permit them to use those engineers?

MS. BARLOW: Typically the engineers that they have on staff are not professional engineers, as defined under this act. And then also, a lot of my clients may hire firms out of Denver and they' re not necessarily certified in Texas.

I' ve been through this with them. We' ve got cable companies out there that for years have been -- they set up sort of islands of their communications systems just within cities to cities, but they, now that they' re in broadband technology, they' re in the process of connecting those communities. They' re going to be in TxDOT right of way and they' re looking at their staffs and they' re saying we don' t have people on staff that are professionally certified engineers.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, the companies that you represent, how would you go hire an engineer to do these things? Do you go through the same process we do, you are covered by the Professional Services Act?

MS. BARLOW: Well, we have industry standards but we certainly don' t have the same procurement requirements that TxDOT has. So no, we don' t have to go out to bid and do it in a public manner.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So if we had an as-built requirement and we needed to get an engineering seal on it, whether we got the seal and paid for it or we got the seal and charged you for it, or whether you got the seal directly and sent us a copy of it.

MS. BARLOW: Right.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, wait a minute. You don' t use the same procedure to hire that engineer as we do?

MS. BARLOW: We don' t use the same procurement procedures, but if we had to hire an engineer --

MR. WILLIAMSON: How would you do it?

MS. BARLOW: Well, we would simply go out and find an engineer that we thought was going to do the best job possible. Since we' re not a government agency, we' re not necessarily subject to the same procurement rules. But certainly we go out and we try to get the best service for the best price.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, okay, stop a second. Amadeo, explain to me how she would get an engineer versus how we would get an engineer for this same process. If you don' t mind, Diane.

MS. BARLOW: No, absolutely.

MR. SAENZ: For our process, we cannot go out there and negotiate, or we cannot go out there and request the fee structure to be part of the procurement. The fee structure or the agreed price is done after the selection process. So we have to go through a two-step process.

In the private sector, they' re not required to do that. They could simply go to a firm and ask them "give your price to provide this service for me," and then they could go to the next one and say "give me your price to provide this service for me," and then they would select whichever they want.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But we can' t do that?

MR. SAENZ: No, sir, we cannot.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So John, is this why you suggest to the industry that they procure their own engineers because it will be cheaper on them if they do it that way?

MR. CAMPBELL: No, that' s not the reason. The reason is that our rules, as they exist now, put the burden of design on the utility, and so that' s why it would be applied to them.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So it wouldn' t be consistent to put the burden of design on them but then us go procure the engineer to certify the as-built.

MR. CAMPBELL: That would be inconsistent.

MR. NICHOLS: Let me ask a question. If a surveyor surveyed it as opposed to a professional engineer -- I mean, I' m pretty satisfied that surveyors know how to measure within real close tolerances, they do it all the time -- would that be more acceptable to the industry, the surveyor' s seal as opposed to the professional engineer?

MS. BARLOW: Let me address that. When we talk about dialogue, one of the dialogues that we had -- and I thought that we had reached a consensus with TxDOT at one point -- was we considered alternatives to PE seals that were less costly to the industry, and one of those was to improve the surveying, and we talked about the importance of a couple of things that we thought would obviate the perceived need for the PE seals, surveying number one.

And it was very important to start these surveys keying off of a TxDOT-designated point because surveys aren' t very good if everyone is using a different starting point, and industry was agreeable to that.

The second added means by which to minimize questions about where facilities are located is more frequent utility coordination meetings. That constant communication is going to go a long way. And number three, stricter compliance with the One Call Statute.

And so we have been pursuing and we believe that there are alternatives to the PE seal requirement that are going to achieve the results that are sought and at a much less significant cost. There will be some costs associated with those alternatives but we think that it is certainly worth pursuing. Try it on an interim basis, see where we are one year or two years from now, and if that' s not satisfactory, let' s look at what else can we do.

But when we looked at PE seals, we did not see the correlation between imposition of PE seals and, I think as TxDOT has recognized, guaranteeing where facilities are located in the rights of way, there just isn' t.

We' ve got insurance carriers that we deal with every day and they are constantly imposing requirements on us or else we' ll have to pay higher rates. Never have they suggested that if we start using PE seals we' re going to have lower rates because there will be less incident of facility damage. There' s no correlation that we can see between the PE seal requirement and the facility location which is the problem here that we' re trying to solve. We think there are other alternatives.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But I' ll tell you, Diane -- and we probably, I say probably because we obviously haven' t decided yet, we' ll probably defer this -- but as a guy who' s in a business that frequently carries me through rights of way, we can sit here in this sterile environment and talk about dig tests, but the reality is you call in and they send the guy or gal out and they may be within five feet and five inches or they may be within 50 feet of where all the lines are.

I can understand why my people are concerned because we are all now digging through somebody else' s fiber optic line and the first letter you get is the $2 million bill for having cut off Los Angeles for two days.

MS. BARLOW: It is an industry concern.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Which maybe you should be rewarded for cutting off Los Angeles for two days.

(General laughter.)

MS. BARLOW: But it is truly an industry concern because when our lines are cut, it puts us at risk for disruption of services.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, you should be supporting this, get a good old civil engineer to certify the location as-built.

MS. BARLOW: We absolutely are supportive, we are very supportive of all actions that we can take that will in fact protect the facilities that are located in the rights of way. We don' t agree that the PE seal is going to achieve that goal.

MR. HOUGHTON: Can a surveyor certify vertical as well as horizontal?

MS. BARLOW: Well, that' s what we were talking about.

MR. HOUGHTON: They can?

MS. BARLOW: Yes, and if we could sort of beef up the surveying requirements, I think that would go a long way.

Let me just say one more thing, and I know that this doesn' t necessarily solve our problems, but I think the concern has arisen because of the very high level of activity in public rights of way. That activity has leveled off.

After 1996 when the markets were deregulated, there was a tremendous surge of construction activity, there was a race to market. Everyone wanted to get their infrastructure in place so that they could be there first; everybody wanted to start competing with SBC tomorrow. That activity has leveled off.

That doesn' t mean we still don' t have the need for some rule amendments for good location requirements, but I think with the leveling off of activity, we have the luxury, if you will, of really sort of thinking through and coming up with a remedy that is both effective in terms of locating facilities while at the same time not being punitive in terms of imposing unnecessary costs.

MR. NICHOLS: I' m not trying to speak for the rest of the commission, but I would think this commission be very reasonable in trying to obtain some type of standard, maybe not a PE seal but some level of certification in surveying. What we are looking for is reasonable assurance of knowing where those utilities are.

I' ve watched the mass competition you were referring to where everybody was scrambling, laying these. In my area in East Texas, I know there were three firms competing which was amazing because they all had their ditch machines going in the rights of way at the same time, side by side.

MS. BARLOW: Oh, yes.

MR. NICHOLS: And I' m sure if I looked at the original engineering drawings that they would be straight lines and had seals on them. However, when you go out and look at the ditch, these things wandered.

It' s a crew that' s out there. They' re trying to do a good job but they also get out there, they run across a big tree and roots, and all of a sudden this ditch goes this way, they hit a rock and it goes way around it, or they hit some other obstacle and it moves around, and the next firm is cutting theirs or the city lays a water pipe and they can' t find them.

So we are determined to try to find some reasonable method of knowing where those lines are -- on that we' re pretty determined. And we' re giving the industry an opportunity to work with us to try to establish what that reasonable level is.

MS. BARLOW: Well, and we really are aligned in that respect. I mean, we can joke about shutting off communications to Los Angeles, but we really don' t want that to happen.

Thank you for your time.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you very much. Good to see you.

MS. BARLOW: Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Leslie? Ms. Leslie Ward.

MS. WARD: Thank you. For the record, I am Leslie Ward; I am the external affairs director for SBC, and I' d like to thank you for allowing us to come and address you today. And I think we' d like to start by applauding this commission for your successes on getting the traffic moving and the recognition that you' ve shown that infrastructure is a lot more than just roads, that it includes rail, pipelines and utilities, all things that vibrant communities need to grow and prosper.

We also appreciate your efforts to move to a more market-driven approach and the innovations that you are pursuing. SBC looks forward to working with you as you lead our state into the 21st Century with a new and improved transportation system.

We also really appreciate the great effort that the staff has put into working on these rules. We do, however, have just a few concerns left with the proposed rule.

SBC does understand that TxDOT needs to know where the facilities are. It' s your job to protect the right of way and know where those facilities are, and we respect that. We also want everyone to know where our facilities are because, like Diane said, if our facilities are cut, our customers are out of service, we look bad, it costs us money to go out there and fix them. We' d just like to see a solution that would be less expensive to the utilities.

Our engineers are not PEs.

MR. WILLIAMSON: How would you secure a PE to go do this?

MS. WARD: We would just out and get the lowest bid or the highest specification with the lowest bid. We don' t have the same procurement requirements you have.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Now, SBC is a pretty big company. Right?

MS. WARD: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So they wouldn' t sacrifice the quality of the engineer in seeking a lower price, would they?

MS. WARD: No. I mean, our facilities are the backbone of our company. If we don' t have the right people looking at our facilities, we' re going to end up with a problem later on.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But you don' t have to use the same -- let' s see, you are totally deregulated now. Right?

MS. WARD: I wouldn' t go that far. We' ll be discussing that this legislative session as the PUC goes under Sunset, so I wouldn' t go that far.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But you don' t follow the same procurement rules that we would have to follow to hire an engineer.

MS. WARD: No, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So if I understood you, Amadeo, we might get as many as five different firms to propose to us on attaching this as-built seal?

MR. SAENZ: We would go out there and procure the services of as many either engineers or surveyors that we would use to basically go out there and inspect the work, and then give us a signed and sealed set of as-built plans.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But securing the person to do that, we would ask for people to tell us if they' re interested in doing this work.

MR. SAENZ: Right. We would open it for an open procurement and get as many firms as felt that they met the qualifications.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And one of those firms could be the same firm that she would judge as being the highest specifications for the less cost.

MR. SAENZ: That' s correct.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But she could go ahead and hire that least cost firm, we have to go in order; we may or may not be hiring the least cost firm.

MR. SAENZ: If that firm is the firm that has the highest qualifications and that firm would be selected first, after we select that firm, then we open and start our negotiation process.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So it would be much less expensive if she found the engineer than if we found the engineer.

MR. SAENZ: Correct.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

Okay, go ahead, Leslie.

MS. WARD: Again, we do understand the reason that you may need the as-built to know where facilities are, we just would like to work with the staff on finding a less expensive alternative.

On the same issue, SBC hopes that the commission will see the importance of keeping these decisions at the statewide level. I know there' s some talk of allowing districts to make those determinations themselves. Most of the companies that are in the right of way are large companies like SBC, we operate statewide, and we' d like to have one set of rules that we know we can follow and put that in our contracts so that our contractors know you follow the TxDOT rules and not you' ve crossed over into another district and now the rules have changed.

SBC' s second area of concern with the proposed rule is a lack of a specific reference to compensation from a property interest upon relocation of the facilities. The proposed rule states that upon relocation of facilities from a property interest such as a private easement, the department will acquire the utility' s property interest; however, the rule is silent regarding the compensation the utility should receive for the transfer of the interest.

So we' d just like to see that clarified that if we' re moved out of a private easement that we have paid for that there would be some compensation on that.

And finally, SBC is concerned with the proposed rules governing shared conduits. Under the proposed rules, utilities must submit joint utility installation requests to the department prior to placement of a new line within an existing conduit.

SBC is required under the Federal Telecom Act to provide shared conduit space to other utilities within specified time periods. When we passed the 1996 act which created all of the competition for us, they set up several rules that said we have to open up our facilities and provide those to our competitors like Diane' s clients.

So our concern is not sharing the conduit, our concern is just that we are under federal regulations on the time period that we have to let our competitors in, so we' re afraid that any state guidelines on that could in fact get us out of compliance with the federal guidelines.

Because SBC feels that all of these concerns can be resolved to the satisfaction of both the department and the utilities with just a little more work and compromise, we would request that you would hold off on adopting these and give us a chance to work with the staff and see if we can come up with some compromises that would be good to protect both TxDOT' s interests and the utilities' interests.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members?

MR. JOHNSON: I have one question, not of Leslie but of probably John and Amadeo, and it' s a path that Robert, I believe, was proceeding on. And my question is what additional degree of confidence do we have requiring an engineer' s seal that we would not have requiring a surveyor' s seal?

MR. CAMPBELL: Quite frankly, I think I would have a greater degree of confidence in the thing that matters with the surveyor' s certification.

MR. NICHOLS: I' m sorry, I missed part of that.

MR. CAMPBELL: I would suggest that my personal confidence would be greater in a surveyor' s certification because really what we are interested in is that location certification.

And I will just clarify, the inclusion of the PE seal is one of those up to which may include. We want to encourage better quality of plans which could include certification up to a PE seal, it' s not a requirement.

MR. NICHOLS: So if we had a surveyor certification of what went down and where it was, we would be leaps ahead of the current process.

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes, sir.

MR. NICHOLS: So that would be a huge step forward. Now, there' s different levels of certification in surveying also, as I understand it. Have you spoken with the surveying community to establish which level of certification would be acceptable?

MR. CAMPBELL: We' re in continuous communication with the surveying community by our Standing Committee on Survey with the department.

MR. NICHOLS: I would think you probably ought to specify that in there also. And I' m just going to kind of ask both of you, how many more months do you think this is going to take? I don' t mean to put you on the spot.

MS. WARD: We are very hopeful that we can sit down in the next few weeks with the staff and come to some quick conclusions. I mean, we' re down to just a few small issues, it just happens to be one is a very expensive issue at SBC, so we' re hopeful that we can do that, sit down with them in the next couple of weeks.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Here' s what they want to do, they want to hold us off long enough to get that telecom bill amended in the legislature to cut us out where they don' t have to worry about us. That' s the deal.

MS. WARD: No, no.

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Leslie.

Do we have to acquire surveyors the same way we acquire engineers: invite a bunch of them to propose, rank them according to specs?

MR. SAENZ: We follow the exact process.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And then we can' t negotiate with them for the lowest price like Southwestern Bell can?

MR. SAENZ: Exactly.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So we may or may not get the least cost for the taxpayer?

MR. SAENZ: Right. Another reason that we wanted the flexibility of up to an engineering seal, there may be a circumstance, special utility installation that would require a select backfill or a select method of installation that may require testing of materials, that may require engineering practice, so that' s the reason that we have taken it that far.

But normally, on a normal installation, for example, that does not have any of those special conditions, all we were looking for is the location of that installation.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We have one more witness, Charles Dolezel.

MR. DOLEZEL: Thank you. For the record, my name is Charles Dolezel; I' m the manager of gas distribution engineering for Center Point Energy here in Houston, and I do want to thank the commission for allowing us to speak. We feel like we have a common goal and that is to serve the public.

We have supplied written comments a couple of times on this subject, but I do want to go over a couple of the key points that we feel like that we' ve supplied the written comments to Mr. Campbell about.

The first one is the PE or the professional land surveyor seal. We feel like our current procedures that we have are definitely adequate, that the addition of the PE or PLS would be of minimal benefit, if any.

One other comment that was made earlier that' s our second area of concern is that the districts could have special requirements. We operate in a large area as well, as was said before. We operate in the Texarkana area, the Beaumont area, the Laredo area, as well as predominantly being in Houston. So we would like to see it stay at a state level as well.

One other one that I would like to mention that has not been mentioned is the area of abandonments. There is a section that talked about abandonments and being able to approve them if they' re abandoned in place. Abandoned in place is our standard; that is our company standard. We feel like that is the best way to proceed forward and we would like to be able to stay with the abandonment in place.

So those are the three areas.

MR. WILLIAMSON: It' s certainly the cheapest way to do it, isn' t it.

MR. DOLEZEL: We feel like it' s the best way as well because it does not disturb the existing structure that' s out there, because usually when we' re abandoning, somebody is coming after us to construct something else.

MR. WILLIAMSON: How would you hire your engineer or surveyor to certify this stuff?

MR. DOLEZEL: We have our engineers on staff for the most part, in Houston, anyway; we have a combination of engineers and professional engineers. However, that is on predominantly the design side. What we would be concerned about is on the as-built side. The as-built side, our inspection people out in the field, they are not professional engineers, most of them are not engineers.

And just, I guess, hypothetically talking here, there' s not specific written documents that we see that says anything about certifying a directional bore, for example. A lot of our facilities are put in directional boring now. We do not wire line our facilities once they' re put in on a directional bore, we go with what we have as an above-ground locate, and that' s the way we want to go.

Would that be satisfactory for a PLS or PE to sign off on? I don' t know. That' s one of the questions we have.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments for Charles?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Charles.

MR. DOLEZEL: Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Staff? Questions or comments for staff, further discussion?

MS. ANDRADE: I do have a couple of questions. Let me understand this. So what we' re saying is that we require a seal because this way we want to make sure that the location has been determined, and should it be wrong, they' re liable.

MR. JOHNSON: We' ve proposed to require.

MS. ANDRADE: We' ve proposed. So they would be held liable. Is that correct?

MR. SAENZ: What we would require is up to a seal.

MS. ANDRADE: Up to a seal.

MR. SAENZ: Up to a seal so that we would know where that installation was placed, both horizontally and vertically.

Now, it' s not necessarily to hold anybody liable, but at least we know so when the next person applies for a permit or an installation on that same facility, we can tell them there is a water line and here are their as-built set of plans. They would still have to coordinate with the previously installed utility company to make sure that everything was done as a check, but at least we have that.

An added benefit is in time, not today because we still have a lot of installations that were done under the old way, in time as we were designing future projects, having that information both horizontally and vertically would allow us to maybe incorporate into our design and work around some of those installations, and then go out there and spot check the areas where we knew that we were going to in conflict. So that' s an added benefit that we would get.

But for right now, it' s more so that we have an assurance that that installation was placed in accordance to what they said they were going to do.

MS. ANDRADE: But you also talked about if they had a survey.

MR. SAENZ: Right. We would like to have some kind of certification that tells us this is where this facility was installed.

MS. ANDRADE: So I guess we' ve got industry that we' re going to affect how they' ve done business before, but they' re also willing to sit at the table and meet with us to figure this out, and they do know that our priority is obviously our need to protect the state. So do you think that we can still do that?

MR. SAENZ: Yes, ma' am. Of course, we have gone through extended workshops and to solicit comments before we drafted the preliminary rules. Then of course, you all adopted the preliminary rules and we did conduct a public hearing in Austin during the comment period, and then of course, some of those comments we are still evaluating. And of course, we' ve received some more today, but I believe that all the entities that were here today submitted comments within the comment period.

We will continue to work with them and then bring something to the commission.

MS. ANDRADE: Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Any other questions or comments, members? Yes, Robert.

MR. NICHOLS: First of all, I want to compliment the staff for bringing an issue forward that' s been a tricky issue for years. I remember discussions on it years ago. And I want to compliment the industry for working with us in a cooperative fashion.

But the main thing I want to say is that any rule that we put in place like this is not locked into stone and perpetuity. We are always able to modify, amend, totally repeal and replace through the commission, and if we run across a snag, a real hurdle or obstacle that we had not, either of us, anticipated, we can bring it back up and we can modify it. We do that all the time.

And I would encourage the industry and the staff to not so much worry about some of these strange exceptions, but if we can get some level of certification from a surveyor just so we' ll know where these things are, pretty close, that we will have together made leaps and bounds of improvement.

And let' s do something like that and then let' s apply it and use it for a year or so, review it and then set a point in time where we all get back together and change it, modify it if we need to. If we need to get to a higher level, so be it; if we need something for these exceptions, so be it; if we can drop it down, so be it. But let' s do something, it needs to be done.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members, it would appear that there is enough rough edge here that we might want to consider deferring this item for a month or two. Any comments you care to offer about that? Anybody in opposition to that?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, Mike. Well, then I think we will indeed defer it for a month or so and give us a chance to work on it.

Thank you, John.

MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you.

MR. BEHRENS: Moving on to agenda item 3(b)(4), final rules for adoption concerning Use of State Property, and this is not for utilities.

MR. LOPEZ: No, nothing to do with utilities.

Good afternoon, commissioners. My name is Carlos Lopez and I' m director of the Traffic Operations Division.

The minute order before you proposes final adoption to the department' s rules for road closures and for film or video production on the state highway system. These amendments are designed to provide maximum flexibility to the districts while maintaining the safety and convenience of the traveling public.

Four of the more significant changes are: one, the district engineer may grant an exception to the current requirement that requests be submitted 30 days in advance; two, traffic control plans submitted in association with these requests must adhere to the Texas Manual on Uniform Control Devices; three, the district engineer may waive the requirement for a traffic control plan if the plan would require only law enforcement personnel and public safety is not in question; and four, the district may enter into multi-year agreements of up to five years if the event stays the same from year to year.

These rules were published in the December 3 edition of the Texas Register and no comments were received. We recommend approval of the minute order.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments on this minute order, members?

(No response.)

MR. NICHOLS: So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. LOPEZ: Thank you, commissioners.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item 3(b)(5) is rules concerning Toll Projects, and this is the permission of certain vehicles to use the toll roads. Phillip?

MR. RUSSELL: Thanks, Mike. Good afternoon, commissioners. For the record, I am Phillip Russell, director of the Turnpike Division.

The minute order before you would allow for the free use by military vehicles on our turnpike projects. The rules provide for the exact type of vehicles, the projects, and the process that would be utilized to enable them to use those turnpike projects.

These rules were posted in the Texas Register and no comments were received. I' d be happy to address any questions you might have.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions, comments, members?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MS. ANDRADE: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. RUSSELL: Thank you.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item number 4 is under Legislative Affairs. Recently over the last several months, we' ve talked about recommendations that are going to our state legislature. Coby Chase of our Legislative Affairs Office will now be making some recommendations to go towards federal legislation in Congress. Coby?

MR. CHASE: Good afternoon. My name is Coby Chase and I' m the department' s director of Legislative Affairs.

I am here before you today with a utility-free presentation asking you to adopt the report regarding your federal priorities for the reauthorization of that enormous body of law occasionally referred to as the Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century, usually just shorted to TEA-21.

Before I summarize our federal priorities, I think it is important to briefly review our actions during the past year, where things stand now, and the outlook for final passage.

As you know, TEA-21 expired on September 31, 2003. Let me briefly recap Congressional action taken this year since then.

Both chambers of Congress started with versions of the six-year bill that were miles apart on funding levels and major policy questions. What finally made it to Conference Committee in Conference Committee negotiations began to hammer out sizable differences between the two bills, most notably the changes to the formula apportionments -- that' s really just code for the rate of return fights.

The House bill wasn' t as progressive as the Senate bill and the formula funding certainly was a substantial step backwards. Various TxDOT initiatives were in the Senate bill including private activity bonds, interstate tolling provisions, and reforms to the existing Border and Corridors Program.

Most of the successes were attributable to the Bush Administration' s innovative Safe TEA proposals and the work of members from other states. However, at the end of the day, attempts to reach a funding consensus in Conference among the White House, Senate and House gave way to the convenience of another consequence-free extension. They' d already done five so number six was pretty easy. The current extension of TEA-21 expires on May 31.

While frustrating, TxDOT has taken the position that we are willing to get it done right versus simply getting it done, a position that has caused some people to scratch their heads until recently.

The renewed call for an inadequately funded bill has greatly strengthened our arguments for policy tools and flexibilities that will allow us to spend our limited federal funds more efficiently and incorporate innovations provided by the private sector. The longer they take in Congress, the more sense our proposals make. Frankly, it has been enjoyable to see these ideas start to take root.

That' s the playing field in very general terms. Next week the White House will release its budget and they will officially signal how much money they would like to see in the bill and that will start people talking. I would just like to caution that' s not the final amount of money that will be in the bill but it will certainly raise eyebrows.

That' s the playing field so now let me discuss the play book, TxDOT' s reauthorization priorities. The federal priorities document before you has been and continues to be our play book. Our priorities were based in large part on state law enacted in 2003, House Bill 3588. You' re already familiar with many of these concepts because they are similar to state transportation tools provided to TxDOT by the state legislature.

If you read the front page of the Austin American-Statesman last Saturday, you' d see that there is more money available for transportation projects, up to 43 percent by one calculation, but taxes weren' t raised to get there. That' s what we' re trying to recreate on the federal level: forget raising taxes and let' s just put the money to better use.

With one exception, our federal priorities aren' t new. They' ve been published in hard copy, distributed widely, requested by Congress over and over again, and have resided on TxDOT' s website for well over a year. But this is a new Congress so it' s best to reaffirm them.

I' ll walk through them at a brisk pace, stop me if you have any questions.

The first issue has to do with design-build contracting. We need to match federal law to state law, allowing state law to be the process we use for acquiring design-build projects, not the rather cumbersome federal law.

We' d also like to allow a single contractor to handle the environmental, design and construction work and let the environmental work be conducted while construction is underway.

The state option for interstate tolling. We' d like to seek states following state law -- and that' s key -- to toll existing portions of the federal system and allow a state to buy back parts of the federal system for this purpose.

Why I say it' s important to say "following state law," what we seek is no matter what Congress were to allow us to do, when it would make sense to toll a portion of the existing interstate, we would have to follow state law to do that, and the state law that' s on the books now sets out certain criteria before we can turn a state-funded road into a toll road. We' d have to follow the same rules if we wanted to toll an interstate as well.

MR. NICHOLS: I hate to say it, but I' m having a hard time hearing. Can you turn up the volume or maybe talk louder or something?

MR. CHASE: Okay, be happy to.

Streamlined environmental review. TxDOT and 49 other DOTs want the process streamlined and final. We are also asking for the law to be changed to allow for concurrent and segmented environmental studies.

Toll credit calculation. Since the state is on a very aggressive toll program, there is no hiding from that. Calculations should be based on a pro rata share of the non-federal contribution.

Surface Transportation System Performance Pilot Program. That' s a mouthful but what it essentially does is allow a state to operate like its own FHWA. The Bush Administration proposed a fairly broad program, the Senate narrowed it a little bit and added one state to the list -- Oklahoma, interestingly enough -- and the House had a version that was really unworkable. We would like to see the Bush Administration' s version of that.

Equity. Going from an 85 percent rate of return, 85-86 rate of return that we currently have to a 95 percent true rate of return. The Border and Corridors Program, make them no longer discretionary programs and turn them into formula programs.

Private activity bonds. Schools and airports and stadiums use this method of finance, and it' s time that roads be allowed to attract the same level of private capital to their projects while offering tax-exempt bonds.

Strengthen some existing financing tools. There are some adjustments to TIFIA and the SIB programs that would enhance their usefulness.

Rail. Allow traditional highway funds to be used for rail relocation purposes. Much like what you heard the mayor describe today, we would like to be able to put into the mix, where it makes sense, Federal Highway dollars into the relocation of rail, and when it makes sense in a community.

The new issue and last on my list and last in the report is something that' s not a very sexy title but it' s very important, Unused Contract Authority. If another state cannot use all of its contract authority in a year, the money they actually put on a project, we' d like to see it sold on a state DOT market of sorts.

For instance if -- I' m going to just make up a state -- Virginia is unable to commit all of its federal funding in one year, other states would be able to buy it from them. There would have to be some instructions; it couldn' t be turned into a program where a state started doing it every year, but if there is unused contract authority that another state feels is going to lapse, another state should be able to buy it with its state money and use it.

And that is an interesting new idea that was raised, I would say, last October by us and it' s starting to take root and people are thinking about it. It' s kind of interesting.

And that concludes my remarks.

MR. JOHNSON: Coby, a question on the unused contract authority. How common is it that a state or several states would finish a year without having used their entire allotment of contract authority?

MR. CHASE: I' m willing to be, and I should probably be corrected on this, but it happens just about every year to one degree or another and then it' s redistributed among the states. It doesn' t get you any more money, if I remember correctly, it just frees up some money and you can go get it and you just don' t get it later on kind of a deal.

But Virginia rather recently was having some real questions about whether or not they could spend their federal money, or part of their federal money. It may have made sense to them to put it out on the market, so to speak, and have another state buy it, giving them money that' s more flexible to them that they can put to whatever uses they see as appropriate.

Again, there would probably be some safeguards that would need to be built in so not all of a sudden their roads collapse.

And recently, New Jersey is having some problems releasing its federal money because of -- and I might have this backwards but the essence of it is they' re giving contracts to people who make political donations, and a state law has snagged up the distribution of federal funds and they might need to get out of a pickle. I wish the gentleman from New Jersey was here; he could tell us a little bit more about that.

MR. WILLIAMSON: In other words, just so not only we can understand it but those in the audience who may be preparing to help us advance our federal program -- and I want to come back to something you said a while ago because I' m a little bothered by it -- every six years the federal government says this is the amount of money to be apportioned to all the states collectively. About what would that be, $200- and maybe $90 billion?

MR. CHASE: It' s less than that, because ours is $2 billion.

MR. WILLIAMSON: That total apportionment is then divided based on a series of formulas so that Massachusetts knows its apportionment is, for example, $2 billion. Well, once the apportionment is made, the only way they can get that $2 billion is to spend their own money on a national highway program that qualifies for the apportionment.

MR. CHASE: Correct.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We believe there are states that cannot spend state resources at a level high enough to get their full apportionment, or in the alternative, we believe there are some states that are forced into making expenditures to get the apportionment that wouldn' t otherwise make those expenditures if they had an alternative.

MR. CHASE: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So what we' re asking the United States Congress to consider is a market-based process where Virginia might decide to spend $10 million of state to get $80 million of federal to build a $90 million project that' s not nearly as important as this $50 million project that will never qualify for federal funds; Texas, do you want to buy $90 million for $40 million, giving us the $50- we need to go and do our non-federal deal and you' ve still got to live with the same federal requirements instead of spending your money on the national highway system.

MR. CHASE: Or put it on an auction block.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So why would anyone that represents Texas not be advocating for that?

MR. CHASE: I don' t know why anyone who is representing Texas would not be advocating that, that would be shocking. Because we enjoy things that other states don' t in this state, and the way we manage our money is better than other states, quite frankly. But I could see on the national level where that would frighten some other states that do have money management issues that we don' t have, that they would be afraid that the federal system would start to get under-funded in certain places and things like that. So we would have to make sure that those concerns were taken care of.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I read your remarks earlier in the morning which were in our book and I listened to what you said, and you say something to the effect of our successes are due primarily or unusually more to the work of other members or groups, or you said something like that. And I don' t want to put words in your mouth, but tell me precisely what you meant by that.

MR. CHASE: Well, when you lay it all out, we' ve worked through the United States Department of Transportation, and other interest groups advanced the flexibility options -- and this is Coby' s opinion and you don' t have to agree with it at all -- but the federal program has pretty much evolved from a program with a national purpose to a national money-grab. It doesn' t seem that we' re trying to build a national system any longer, it is a national money-grab, and we are going to grab as much as we can too, and it is hard to distract people from the money fight, and it has been difficult for some of our folks to understand the value of what we' re doing.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Some of our folks being defined as our Congressional representation?

MR. CHASE: Yes, to be quite frank.

And we are now cranking out headline after headline after headline related to House Bill 3588, and that was a big leap of faith the legislature took with us and they are reaping the benefits of it.

It has been more difficult to make that case on the federal level when all that is dangled out there is demonstration project money and things like that, and just the simple rate of return discussion.

And if you look at the math --

MR. WILLIAMSON: So for example -- not to pick on anyone, I' ll use all five of you -- it' s more interesting for the Dallas Morning News, the Fort Worth Star Telegram, the Austin American-Statesman, and the Houston Chronicle to write editorial congratulating someone for getting $25 million for a project than it is to write an editorial congratulating someone for getting the State of Texas the flexibility it needs to build a $2 billion highway.

MR. CHASE: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: How do we cure that? How do we address that? What do we do to get their attention?

MR. CHASE: Well, frankly I would like to see us -- I mean, we simply just have to keep pressing the case, we have to work with our partners harder. I mean, when you do the math, when you do the simple math on the federal level, nobody is going to raise the gas tax, there is not more money going into the system, we are going to bust our backs to try to get a 95 percent rate of return, and if we do, I will be the most surprised person at TxDOT, and I' ve been doing this for eleven years.

And we need to do a better job of making people understand the legacy they' re going to leave for Texas and the nation in this bill is not going to be the rate of return, because when you think about that, everybody is a loser. We' re just losing a little less than we used to lose and New York is just losing a lot more than they used to lose. All you' re doing is creating losers in a money-grab, just different degrees of losers.

I believe we need to just keep pressing the case, showing the successes of House Bill 3588, and show you can recreate that on the federal level and it will not cost you a dime.

Almost everything we' re asking for is revenue-neutral, we don' t need anybody' s money to do it, and that has been very hard.

MR. NICHOLS: Mr. Chairman, picking up on what you were saying about emphasis and recognition for what is done, I know from past experience on the commission that if a community feels like they almost had a project -- like this $50 million project -- if it were Houston and all of a sudden that money went to Dallas, they would be horrified. Or if it went from Austin to San Antonio -- not picking on towns but I' m just saying one way or the other -- there would be bad stuff written on one end and maybe good stuff written on the other.

But at the same time all that' s going on, it doesn' t seem to bother people nearly as much, or the news media or the public, that they' re taking $500 million a year away of our money and spending it in Massachusetts or in Vermont or New Hampshire. That doesn' t seem to even create a wave; it always is amazing to me.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, I think the thing I' m most concerned about, Coby, in looking at the report, it' s my understanding that certain federal rules could be altered to permit us to design as we build and build as we design that would save us more money on one large project than getting us equity from the 86 to 95 percent would give us.

MR. CHASE: Absolutely. Our last calculations on if we were wildly successful and went from where we are now to a 95 percent rate of return, it would probably be about $230-, $250 million a year. That' s nice but there' s half an interchange somewhere.

But when you heard the mayor discuss and I believe the judge discussed too, you know, the true pressing mobility needs or the pressure the rail system in Houston is putting on the road system, snarling traffic, trains blocking streets, things like that, that' s not a road or rail problem, that' s just a transportation problem. You should be able to bring different things to the solution; it' s a flexibility issue.

MR. HOUGHTON: And it' s not sexy, though, to politicians, they like to see things in Washington that they can come back to their districts and say look what I got you. And someone in El Paso, Texas that brings a million dollars of earmark -- which is a drop in the ocean, or a drop in the Rio Grande River for our case -- and they say look what I got you, and the provincialism that occurs, instead of looking on the statewide -- and I don' t know how you' re going to get over that.

As you know, Coby, I was up there visiting with certain people and I was dumbfounded by the attitude. We have a president from Texas, we have leadership people, and for some reason we' re not getting it done. And I' m just dumbfounded by it.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But what I' m trying to focus on is why is that, Ted. Is it because we' ve done a bad job of explaining to them the value? Is it because they' re not interested in --

MR. HOUGHTON: In my opinion, I don' t think we' re in their face enough, I really don' t. I think you have to get in their face, you have to have certain events that they understand what you' re trying to do. Economic development, how Houston does truly benefit the state as an economic driver; El Paso, if you do things out in El Paso, instead of being a recipient of tax receipts, we become a contributor to the state coffers, to the federal coffers if we get some things done.

MR. WILLIAMSON: How' s the majority leader doing? I mean, he seems to have been more interested in transportation recently.

MR. CHASE: Yes. The busiest man in Congress. If you' ve listened to him between Congresses, he talks a whole lot about this, and I don' t like to over-comment on the political process, but if you watched this as closely as we did, that bill had to get to Conference to get fixed, and the majority leader had himself appointed to the Conference Committee which is a rare move. That shows you the level of attention he wanted to pay to it.

MR. HOUGHTON: And we have no one on the Senate side on the Conference Committee.

MR. CHASE: No.

MR. HOUGHTON: And that hurts.

MR. CHASE: And that hurts, and we don' t have anybody on the committee this year. Senator Cornyn cycled off to the Budget Committee which is not unexpected, but it occurred nonetheless.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But you' re saying that the majority leader maybe does understand the importance of this.

MR. CHASE: He does but he is not the only person there and he is fighting a lot of interests that get a little spooked by what we' re suggesting.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But my impression, from what you say, is that he not only understands it but is beginning to carry the load, so we need to encourage that.

MR. CHASE: Well, and we need to say thank you, and realize he is only one person. No matter how strong he is, he' s got a thousand other things to do, other people need to help him carry the load too.

MR. JOHNSON: Allow me to make an observation, and that is this. We have several champions around the state in the state delegation that represent transportation interests, not only for their community but statewide, in Washington.

I think the challenge we have is that we don' t have enough, and as Ted has pointed out, certainly on the Senate side, we don' t have somebody in a strategic position. Majority Leader Delay, transportation is a very large issue in his priority scale, and he has exhibited leadership not only for this community but for the state on the reauthorization process that we had been going through for some time.

Congressman Burgess, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson have been true champions on not only individual issues that we' ve asked their support on but also on the transportation package.

I just don' t think we have the breadth and the depth. Congressman Naugebauer from Lubbock, he grew his teeth on transportation issues and he' s been supportive when he can. But we' ve run into a challenge that we don' t have the breadth and depth in our own delegation, and unfortunately, some of these issues and ways of doing things have crossed party lines and people have adopted a party attitude as opposed to what I' ve described to the mayor as a commonsensical, entrepreneurial attitude of the way you get things done. I mean, that' s just my observation.

And hopefully we can strengthen our message and get the Texas Congressional Delegation -- we have two new members on the House Transportation Committee, and it' s incumbent upon us to recruit them, and I' m sure they' ll be recruitable.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Where has US DOT been on our flexibility requests?

MR. CHASE: They have been -- to use this phrase that has already been used once today and was used previous started by Glen Whitley -- they have been partners, not parents. It has been very refreshing. Six years, seven years, eight years ago when we did, when we were going from ISTEA to TEA-21, US DOT all they did was they wanted more programs, set aside more money for more specialized projects and gave us more regulations.

The current administration has been nothing but great. We walk hand in hand and talk to them about things with Congress, like private activity bonds, acting like your own DOT, tolling, all sorts of things. It has been marvelous.

You did bring up Congressman Burgess. He put all of our concepts on the table in the Rapid Act, just about all of them, and he fought to the death to try to get them in there, he wasn' t successful, and now he' s moved to another committee. But I was remiss in not noting Congressman Burgess' s role; he was fantastic, and for a freshman he really took the bull by the horns.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Who moved into his spot?

MR. CHASE: Well, we have two new Texans on the Republican side on the committee: Congressman Poe from this area, and Congressman Marchant.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Former District Judge Poe?

MR. CHASE: Yes, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I know he can be tough when he wants to be.

MR. CHASE: Yes, that' s what I understand.

MR. JOHNSON: And creative.

MR. CHASE: Creative, yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Well, I don' t see anything wrong with our agenda so I' m going to ask the commission to endorse it. Whatever we need to do, whether it' s you tell us what to do or whether we need to go recruit in the community to convey to our Congressional leaders.

It just seems to me when I first came on the commission, the only argument you and I really had was about this equity business, and I told you four years ago, having been through the legislative process, I just never saw the day when Massachusetts would cut the pie for Texas. I just don' t think that will ever happen.

But I can see the day that the United States Congress might be persuaded to let us bake the pie a different way and maybe a little cheaper and faster, to solve the transportation problems we have in this state.

MR. CHASE: And not tell us how to eat the pie.

MR. JOHNSON: Let me emphasize here that the vast majority of these issues are revenue-neutral; they' re not going to cost anybody anything, and they' re going to give people more flexibility. These are not money issues with the exception of the rate of return which is important, but if you give us the flexibility to do our job, I think we' re proving that we can do a pretty good job of it. It is money or capital that makes the engine move, though.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Coby needs commission endorsement to move ahead. Do I have a motion?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MS. ANDRADE: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor, signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. CHASE: Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Coby. Sorry to put you through some uncomfortable tunes.

MR. BEHRENS: Moving on, we' ve already covered agenda item number 5; we' ll move on to agenda item number 6 which is our General Engineering Consultant Quarterly Progress Report and recommendation to accept that. Phil?

MR. RUSSELL: Thank you, Mike. And again, for the record, I' m Phil Russell, director of the Turnpike Division.

This is the ninth in a series of progress reports. As you all know, Austin had a very wet year last year. With that being said, the prognosis of the Central Texas Turnpike Project is very bright. The project remains on schedule, and in fact, elements of the Central Texas Project are as much as a year or a year-and-a-half ahead of schedule.

The project, as of the end of November which was the period covered by this update, was $450 million under budget, and that accounts for all of the projects, the 45 and Loop 1 traditional projects, as well as the State Highway 130 design-build project.

I' d be happy to address any questions you might have on it. Yes, sir?

MR. NICHOLS: In our previous quarterly report we were concerned a little bit by the progress we were having on right of way acquisition.

MR. RUSSELL: Yes, sir.

MR. NICHOLS: Have we accelerated that process?

MR. RUSSELL: Yes, sir. We have 408 parcels that will be required for 130. We' ve made offers on over 300, 310 of those. 186 are now available for construction. We have construction activities occurring now on Segments 1, 2 and 3 which effectively gets us down to 71, and the last segment, Segment 4, is due to begin construction this Spring. So I think we' ve gotten their attention.

MR. NICHOLS: Now, we had anticipated, because of the sheer size of this project, that a lot of these would end up going to condemnation, and that when we do that, the process we go through and the department goes through on condemnation, it may get overloaded. You know, we' re going to send this big wave all in, or at least we were anticipating it may be a problem. Are we preparing for that?

MR. RUSSELL: Richard or John may be better able to answer the question, but I think we' re in good shape on that. Condemnation is running fairly high on 130, as you would anticipate.

MR. NICHOLS: Can you speak to it then?

MR. RUSSELL: Richard or John?

MR. NICHOLS: That is going to be critical.

MR. CAMPBELL: We' ve been in conversation with the Attorney General' s Office specific to this point and then having the capacity to maintain the pace as we go. Right now we' re not seeing a disproportionately large number of condemnations for 130. I' ve got seven this month which is a very manageable load for any given time.

MR. NICHOLS: But when they do hit -- it' s kind of like the big wave that' s coming -- are we anticipating the wave and are we preparing for it?

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes, and the Attorney General' s Office has dedicated specific resources to just the 130 project for that.

MR. NICHOLS: So they know there' s a wave coming and they' re committed that they' re going to gear up for it.

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes, sir.

MR. NICHOLS: Okay.

MR. RUSSELL: And Commissioner, of course by that contract there' s a limitation on how many of those parcels, those appraisals they can bring to us each month, so I think that helps us kind of manage that wave.

MR. NICHOLS: Okay.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions, members, comments?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do I have a motion?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MR. JOHNSON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item number 7 under Finance is also part of the 130 project, CTTP project on our Quarterly Investment Report. John?

MR. MUNOZ: Good afternoon. For the record, my name is John Munoz, deputy director of the Finance Division.

Item 7 seeks approval of the Quarterly Investment Report for the Central Texas Turnpike Project for the quarter ending November 30, 2004.

Through November, construction expenditures of $814 million have been incurred and interest paid to bondholders and related expenses of $168 million and other transactions have resulted in a balance of funds invested of $1.7 billion at the end of November which has been provided in the report that we have provided to you.

Staff recommends your approval, and I will be glad to answer any questions you may have.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments, members?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MR. JOHNSON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor, signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item number 8 is our State Infrastructure Bank, an application from Hidalgo County for a SIB loan.

MR. MUNOZ: Item 8 requests final approval of an application submitted by Hidalgo County requesting a loan of $1.2 million for construction costs of Mile 2 West Road from Mile 12 North Road to 0.2 miles south of State Highway 107 in Hidalgo County. This road is not on the state highway system but is eligible for federal aid.

Staff recommends your approval and I' ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments, members?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MS. ANDRADE: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion, signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item number 9 is under Building Construction, and if approved by the commission, this would authorize submission to the Bond Review Board, the approval of a lease with option to purchase for the construction of a new Houston District Headquarters building. Let' s see if all these Houston District employees are ready.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Listen, after having to go to the Czechoslovakian dance hall for dinner last night, I' m all for getting us a new district.

(General laughter.)

MR. MUNOZ: Need some two-stepping room, I think.

Item 9 seeks authorization to file an application with the Texas Bond Review Board to enter into a lease with option to purchase agreement for the Houston District Headquarters. Staff recommends your approval and I' ll be glad to answer any questions you might have.

MR. JOHNSON: I had a question.

MR. NICHOLS: I had sent in a couple of questions -- we' re still talking about Houston.

MR. MUNOZ: Right.

MR. NICHOLS: The actual terms and stuff were not originally in my packet. You are looking at a 30-year lease-purchase?

MR. MUNOZ: Yes, sir. That' s kind of the direction that we' re gravitating towards.

MR. NICHOLS: Have we considered -- I know the further you go out, the lower the annual.

MR. MUNOZ: Absolutely.

MR. NICHOLS: But I know my industrial buildings and stuff, I never went 30 years out. If we shorten it to 20 or 25, have we given those consideration? I know I have not been presented with any options as a commissioner member.

MR. MUNOZ: Right. We are looking at a 20, 25 and 30 year option, and we are still in the contract development process. We' re going to start the financing negotiations starting next week, and we' re going to be looking at all those options, including early payout capability as well as the lease payment over time and maybe it might vary in order to take advantage, or even the starting point when we start making lease payments in order to minimize the interest expense to the state.

MR. NICHOLS: Okay. And at some point when you get those three options, 20, 25, 30, we will have an opportunity for input on that?

MR. MUNOZ: Absolutely.

MR. NICHOLS: I think this has been a great program. It was a special kind of unusual thing we were given the opportunity to do, and everything I' ve seen on it so far has just been wonderful. I know that it has worked so well, I think one of the requests we had made was maybe we could take -- we have a lot of area offices and maintenance offices, some of them are literally barns out there, waiting for their turn, and there' s a reasonable opportunity that we may be able to bundle some of those up into a package that somebody would be interested in putting together a package like this where they would design it, build it, finance it, the whole thing.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I' m for it.

MR. MUNOZ: Finance those collectively and reduce the interest costs.

MR. NICHOLS: I' m for pursuing that option.

MR. MUNOZ: Okay.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Other questions or comments, members?

MR. JOHNSON: So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item number 10 is our contracts for the month of January, this would be Maintenance contracts as well as Highway and Building contracts. Thomas?

MR. WILLIAMSON: It wasn' t your family that cooked that barbecue for us last night, was it?

MR. BOHUSLAV: I don' t believe we' re related, no.

MR. WILLIAMSON: You' re related to them?

MR. BOHUSLAV: I don' t believe we' re related; there may be some relation somewhere, though.

My name is Thomas Bohuslav; I' m director of the Construction Division.

Item 10(a)(1) is for consideration of award or rejection of Highway Maintenance contracts let on January 11 and 12, 2005 whose engineers' estimated costs are $300,000 or more. We had 30 projects, an Average of 3.3 bidders per project.

We have one project we recommend for rejection, Project Number 4016 in Tarrant County, it' s a mowing contract. It was about 61 percent over. We did have a lot of bidders but we' d like to go back and rebid that and see if we can get a better price for that work.

Staff recommends award with the exception noted.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments, members?

MR. JOHNSON: I would make the motion.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor, signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BOHUSLAV: Item 10(a)(2) is for consideration of award or rejection of Highway Construction and Building contracts let on January 11 and 12, 2005. We had 104 projects; the letting was $619 million; we had an overrun of about 7.7 percent.

We have three projects we recommend for rejection. The first one is Project Number 3250 in Cameron County; it was 37 percent over and we had two bidders on it; it was for State Highway 48 there to widen the four lanes with a median as well. There some unique requirements for some of the materials in there and we' d like to go back and redesign the bridge components and some special precast median barriers as well.

The second project recommended for rejection is Project Number 3346 in Knox County; it was 31 percent over; we had one bidder on the project. We' d like to solicit some more competition and get better prices for that.

Project Number 3236 is the third project we recommend for rejection; it' s in Pecos County at 32 percent over; we had two bidders for that; it' s overlay work or pavement rehab work on I-10. We' d like to go back and re-look at our pavement strategy on that and see if we can save the state some money on that as well.

Staff recommends award of all projects with the exceptions noted.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions or comments, members?

MR. NICHOLS: The only comment I have is that almost $620 million. That' s an awful good month. My hat' s off to everybody for putting that much work out.

MR. BEHRENS: I think we' ve done what, Thomas, this year, about $2 billion, when you look at the January letting?

MR. BOHUSLAV: I don' t know if Mark is here.

MR. BEHRENS: I was just looking at that report the other day. I think it' s about $2 billion.

MR. HOUGHTON: What' s the number?

MR. BEHRENS: $2 billion so far this fiscal year, September through January.

MR. JOHNSON: Five months.

MR. HOUGHTON: Is it unusual or usual on one project to have only one bidder on a $204 million contract?

MR. BOHUSLAV: We do get projects with one bidder on them. This is the second occasion that we' ve had a project on this corridor that had one bidder on it.

The district made some extra effort before they began letting these projects to look and see how they could split them out best to get competition, and Gary can speak to that better than I. So they did look at that issue.

I think the answer to that question is that this contractor seems to give us really good prices and the other contractors have difficulty in beating those prices, and therefore they fail to submit a bid and just didn' t feel like they could compete with this contractor on the project.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Other questions or comments, members?

MR. JOHNSON: So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, nay.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item 10(b) is one Contract Claim for this month, and Amadeo will present that.

MR. SAENZ: Good afternoon, commissioners. For the record, Amadeo Saenz, Jr., assistant executive director for Engineering Operations.

The minute order before you approves a claim settlement for a contract by Longview Bridge and Road, Incorporated, for Project STP 2000(43)RM in the Upshur County of the Atlanta District. The contractor was requesting additional compensation for erosion control excavation.

On December 1, 2004, TxDOT Contract Claims Committee considered the claim and made a recommendation for settlement to the contractor. The contractor has accepted our recommendation. The committee considers this to be a fair and equitable settlement of the claim, and requests approval of this minute order.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I still have a hard time believing that 118 to 6 is fair and equitable.

MR. SAENZ: It was fair and equitable. The district had already paid for the work, there was a disagreement as to how much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I hope we' re not taking advantage of these guys.

MR. SAENZ: No, sir, we' re not.

(Pause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Any other questions or comments?

MR. JOHNSON: So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, nay.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. SAENZ: Thank you.

MR. BEHRENS: Agenda item 11 is our Routine Minute Orders. They were all duly posted as required. I don' t think any of those minute orders impact any of the commissioners personally in any way.

I might remind you that under the Speed Zones there are some 75 mile an hour speed zones that will be put in place out in the Odessa District. Other than that, I recommend approval.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Just keep them west of Dallas-Fort Worth.

MR. BEHRENS: I recommend approval of all the Routine Minute Orders.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members, the Routine Minute Orders are before you. Do you have anything you wish to discuss, ask Mike about, comment upon?

(No response.)

MR. NICHOLS: Do you need a motion? So moved.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, nay.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries.

MR. BEHRENS: That concludes all of our regular business. We don' t see any need for an Executive Session.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, members, we have a variety of citizens who wish to give us an opinion today; there are as many as 16. Do you wish to take a break before we begin, or do you want to keep moving?

MR. HOUGHTON: Let' s keep going.

MS. ANDRADE: Let' s keep going.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And we do want to hear what you have to say. Again, we just ask you to try to restrict your time to about three minutes.

If you don' t mind, we' ll start with you, Polly Ledvina. Is someone's first name Polly?

VOICE: She stepped out of the room.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Is it Patty?

VOICE: There is a Polly, she stepped out of the room.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay, we' ll defer her for a moment.

Connie O' Donnell?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Robin Holzer?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Yvonne Tallent?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Teresa Allen?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Linda Mercer?

MS. MERCER: Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today, and I would like to be the second person, at least, to invite you back to our town soon.

I live in Houston, I' ve lived here all my life; I' ve lived all over town but for the last 25 years I' ve lived in the inner-city neighborhood known as Cottage Grove. Some of you may have seen the boundaries of Cottage Grove on TV. The neighborhood is right along Interstate 10 at T.C. Jester where the floods take place. We actually refer to that part of 10 as "River 10" when that sort of thing takes place, and Allison and other storms subsequently have put a lot of water in that corridor.

But I bring that just to try to give you some perspective of where our neighborhood is. It' s about three miles from here, just east of the I-10/610 interchange where so much work has been done to improve the congestion and traffic flow into the city.

Neighbors of mine, new investors, people that have just moved into the neighborhood, we' re densing up as much as we can. We have many new homes that are meeting the minimum lot size requirement, to take what used to be a 25x100-square-foot lot and make it smaller so that we can have many, many, many new neighbors in the neighborhood, and some of those new neighbors and long-term residents.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We like your presentation.

MS. MERCER: You do?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Yes. You did it the right way.

MS. MERCER: Thank you.

We' re really keen to know more about what' s going to happen in the right of way that' s close to us, and we have heard that HCTRA has plans to pave that right of way, or they' re looking at it, and that there are people who meet in West Houston, engineers and developers, to talk about paving the right of way.

We really have tried very diligently to find out about what' s going on in that section of TxDOT right of way, but we' ve been thwarted in getting the facts in these past months, and they' ve really eluded us to date.

So I' m here today to speak to you to let you know that we really do support the idea that' s been floating around that the citizens deserve to have public exposure to what kind of plans Harris County Toll Road Authority is making with regard to streets in our neighborhoods.

My concern is that without required meetings, taxpaying citizens will be the last to know about plans that are being made, and to borrow the mayor' s words this morning, our entrepreneurial contribution will be left out entirely if we don' t have a chance to speak up, and neighborhoods and alternative forms of transportation will not be given due consideration as so many more millions of people move to my hometown in the next 20 years.

Thank you for your attention to this request for public meetings.

MR. NICHOLS: Thank you very much.

E.I. Smith regarding toll road.

MR. SMITH: I' m one of the newer ones in the county; I bought my home out there in Cottage Grove in 1949, been there a while. This here was a pasture where you' re sitting at now, belonged to Bob Smith.

We have a real problem now facing us. They' ve come in and moved the steel mill and several other places, buildings that we had in the Grove; some of the railroads tracks, about nine-tenths of the railroad tracks they have removed; now they' re filling it in to build some homes. I understand now they have about 50 or 60 to start with to build homes on this property.

What it' s done, it' s brought one of the highest lands in the city of Houston when it used to be Cottage Grove, Texas, now it' s a flood plain. I need at least two retainer tanks.

MR. NICHOLS: You need what?

MR. SMITH: Two tanks, sir, to catch water. Now they want to build one down by the far end of the Hempstead Highway, but what I understand that, then they want to pump some water out of old 290 that has a railroad underpass, they want to pump some of that water out of that into one of these retainer tanks to keep the street from flooding.

Well, what they' re doing now, they' re raising this some 12-14 inches. I' m going to have a flood problem that' s going to affect all, it' s going to affect my bus system, it' s going to affect everything else.

Now, one of the others we hear, they' re talking about a toll road. Now, I need a toll road through there about -- well, I won' t comment on that, I think I have a few people that made a few comments on that that I wouldn' t like to repeat. But some of them just says why do the people not have the right. How can they pass and say we' re a nation that has all the rights in the world, how can they pass a law where the citizens cannot complain or reject a toll road coming through and causing the problems to all the homes that the people has built out there for years and years?

Why in the world can they pass a law? We need this law repealed.

MR. NICHOLS: Is it because it' s a road.

MR. SMITH: Well, they want a road, they want to build a toll road. I understand it may be four or six lanes.

MR. NICHOLS: If it were not a toll road but just a road, would you still be objecting to it?

MR. SMITH: This is a toll road.

MR. NICHOLS: I understand, but let me ask you a question. If it did not have a toll on it, would you not have an objection to it?

MR. SMITH: No. I don' t want a road in there, period.

MR. NICHOLS: You just don' t want a road in there, period. So it' s not so much whether it' s a toll or a non-toll, you just don' t want a road in there.

MR. SMITH: What I would like to have, if it were possible -- and we' ve studied with the past city council -- is a light rail. That would take care of all the problems of the people on 290, a lot of them on I-10 from the west coming into town. My goodness, just doing that would take care of so many people that' s coming in, it would protect my children. Right there within a four-block area, if we had a road in there, a highway, I have about 500 children this would affect because I-10 and 290 with all the traffic on them would come within four blocks of one another.

I just can' t have a road in there. If we don' t, let' s just go ahead and use that all to build new apartments and projects but put two retainer tanks in there to hold the water because that' s what we need real bad.

It' s a real problem. On transportation, I' m a backer of transportation and all, but at one of my civic club meetings I was asked a question: Why would you appoint a gentleman who is an automobile dealer chairman of the board of transportation. I can' t answer that.

Chairman of the board of transportation. I' m just going to quote what I hear. He said that' s like a farmer putting a wolf guarding a chicken house.

MR. JOHNSON: Could I ask a question. How far out 290 is your place?

MR. SMITH: We' re right in town.

MR. JOHNSON: Which exit off of 290 is closest to your place?

MR. SMITH: 290 is just right at the end of 6300 block of Kansas Street where you run under Hempstead Highway which is really 290.

MR. JOHNSON: Well, one thing, I want to thank you for being here and expressing your opinion, and I do think this is a good outlet and a good forum for citizens with concerns to exercise their right to be heard, and I appreciate your being here.

As far as your observation about the rail situation, when we began the meeting, the chairman of Metro and the president of Metro were here, the county judge was here. We' re partnering with both of those agencies to do studies to create multimodal solutions to our transportation challenges.

The unfortunate thing is these do not happen overnight; the studies take time and then coming up with consensus as what' s the appropriate action takes time; and then the funding part of it takes time. So these aren' t overnight cures but we are endeavoring to find the long-range solutions to the transportation mobility issues not only of the Greater Houston area but the cities and towns all across the state.

MR. SMITH: Well, I understand that there are 30 years of city problems and all, but again, in this section here I know they will build approximately 400 new apartments in this area, that' s just a start. But again, it' s very important, very important that we don' t have any kind of road in there unless it' s the light rail because it won' t take that much up.

And I understand there' s a section of the Union Pacific Railroad now that' s going in a certain section, going in to serve a company that' s making concrete. I understand that in the next three to four years, that section of railroad will be moved, the railroad and the cement plant will be moved out. Ladies and gentlemen, that would be a real spot for light rail and bring in hundreds and hundreds of people for transportation.

Can you imagine Robert Louis Stevenson, my school I have right there within the four-block area between I-10 and that, we have approximately 400,000 vehicles a day. It' s not good for our children, and then we have a lot of people, small companies in there that we' d like to keep these small companies operating because they do put jobs available for the people who can afford to get to them and don' t have to move to new neighborhoods.

MR. JOHNSON: Thank you.

MR. SMITH: I appreciate it. I know it' s a real problem and it' s hard to explain, but we do have a problem where we had one of the highest places in the city of Houston and now we' re a flood plain.

MR. NICHOLS: Thank you very much for taking the time to be here.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We really do appreciate it. We noticed you sat here all day long and listened and we take note of what you say.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, sir.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Noble Windsor?

VOICE: I think he' s left.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Are you the first in command of this house?

VOICE: Pardon?

MR. WILLIAMSON: I was thinking maybe that was Ms. Noble Windsor, because we were just looking, Noble Windsor, we asked him what his title was and he said, "Second in command at my house."

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: David Mifflin?

MR. MIFFLIN: My name is David Mifflin; I live out in Spring, Texas.

I' m just here to comment quickly and briefly on what I feel is a need and a necessity for perhaps some changes in the state legislation regarding the powers of toll road authorities in the state of Texas.

I feel these entities have been given almost carte blanche to carry out their projects with little input from residents or municipalities that are affected by toll road construction. And these toll road authorities appear to be accountable to too few people, especially the residents in the counties that they affect.

There appears to be too many opportunities exist for mismanagement of tolls collected from toll roads leading to questionable use of tolls. According to Independent Toll Road Newsletter, the Harris County Toll Road Authority produces no annual report and publishes no financial accounts, and the only financial account information on HCTRA comes from accounting performed by clerks in the county audit office.

This situation is less than desirable when taxes and the toll fees collected are being dealt with. There must be open and easily accessible information as to monies collected and spent by the toll road authorities.

In particular what I' m concerned about is in 2003 the commissioners court raised toll road fees under the explanation that the money was to be used to improve and expand the toll road system. Mike Stretch, the HCTRA director, said that the increases were needed for E-Z Tag lanes and to support the extra debt service incurred in construction of the new West Park Tollway and extension of the Hardy Toll Road into downtown Houston.

The Houston Chronicle reported on January 16 of this year and January 26 of this year that HCTRA has been diverting toll funds to finance at least 33 other road projects in the county, many of which are projects that were funded by 1997 and 2001 bond referendums, and the commissioners court claims that these projects are what they call connectivity projects. They' re funding non-tolled county roads that connect or enhance traffic flow to the toll road facilities, and in that case they' re justified in using the money for that because it does serve a purpose to the toll road.

But the Chronicle review of the roads showed that out of the 33 projects, only three of them actually connect to a toll road and they said that very few showed little relation between them and the toll roads themselves, and the funds are used to finance additional non-tolled roads or to improve and expand existing free highways and roads that, in effect, become direct competition to the toll road system.

From 2001 to 2004, toll fees subsidized 28 percent of all county free road projects. That' s $107 million, or 14 percent off the top of all tolls collected in Harris County. In effect, what' s happening is that instead of all the county residents repaying the bonds through property taxes, the burden of financing these roads has been shifted to the toll road users, and so in effect, tolls have become stealth taxes.

The full funding burden now is placed on today' s county residents using the toll roads rather than spreading the burden over the life of that road as the bond issues are supposed to do.

In addition to creating an unfair financial burden distribution, we have no way of ensuring that HCTRA is setting enough money aside to cover repairs to an already aging system or to pay, for example, the $928 million in outstanding tax bonds that guarantee the Hardy Toll Road.

This past Tuesday HCTRA asked commissioners court to approve $5.6 million to hire engineers to develop a route for the Grand Parkway in north Harris County through Spring where I live. Mike Stretch, the HCTRA director, said that HCTRA was asked by you to join into the studies with them.

What our concerns are is that why does HCTRA need to spend $5.6 million of county taxes to perform road studies when we have been very appreciative of our relationship with TxDOT and the Grand Parkway Association in the studies that they have been performing and what we feel to be the proper and intelligent and well-advised, from TxDOT' s position, practice of going back and revising the DEIS study that they have brought out since it was so seriously flawed in the beginning.

I just think that changes to state law are imperative to protect the county taxpayers against very real tax dangers to county residents. All toll road projects, I feel, must go through a series of public meetings to inform the public of the scope and nature of the project, as well as gather input and comments from the public.

Since toll road funded projects rely on county tax dollars and bonds, I ask that no new toll road project utilizing bonds be allowed to proceed without a valid initiative. And if HCTRA is going to get into the business of taking on capital projects such as general road repairs like Metro does, they should maybe be held to the same accountability as Metro as far as releasing financial information.

That' s it. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Questions, dialogue, comments for Mr. Mifflin?

MR. NICHOLS: I' m just going to make some comments. You obviously have studied this quite extensively and we appreciate the fact that people who come talk to us about their concerns have taken the time to research it. That' s number one.

Number two, the thought that you have that excess revenues from tolls should not be spent on anything other than the toll road, there' s a lot of people that disagree with your thought on that. And there is a disagreement at the legislature, at the local, whatever, that is an area of issue around the state: should you or should you not. The overwhelming majority, as represented by the members to the legislature, agree that since a region is paying the tolls that the surplus revenues should be decided locally on where to spend those extra revenues, and they have decided that they can be spent on transportation projects.

Now, there is a slight difference of law between what a county toll road can do and what your new regional mobility authorities can do, but it is actually going away from even further your line of thought. It has now expanded to the point that as we create new regional mobility authorities around the state, the surplus revenue not only can be spent on roads, but other transportation projects: it can go into transit, it can go into light rail or commuter rail, it can go into the airport.

So if the first concern bothers you, you' re really going to have a hard time with where it' s going.

MR. MIFFLIN: Right, and if I could just address that real quickly. From what you said, I think the way I presented that aspect of it was not clear. I don' t necessarily have a problem with tolls or fees generated from the toll road being used on other transportation projects, especially rail. I mean, I would be the first one to welcome toll road fees to be used on rail projects.

I know what I meant to put across is that before these projects have money allocated to them by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, there should be greater, first of all, assurance to the taxpayers that the money exists for those without taking the money away from paying already voted upon tax-backed bonds that are guaranteed by taxes that will be coming due in however many years, and that there should be greater accessibility to the taxpayers at large to financial statements or accounts of HCTRA to make sure that they are solvent.

I know Harris County Treasurer Don Sumner, this was back in 1998, but the only audit I could find in print was done by the Chronicle which at that time was concerned because the Hardy Toll Road was losing $10 million a year after people were told it was going to pay for itself. And then he said when you bring into account the fact that HCTRA is not putting aside money for repairs on an aging toll road system, that HCTRA was actually, in his opinion, $300 million in the red.

I haven' t seen anything since 1998 to kind of tell us what that is, and part of that is because there is no accessible information, accounting information or auditing information coming from HCTRA.

MR. NICHOLS: Let me just say from everything I have seen that the Houston region is just very fortunate that that agency was created. It has been a real treasure to the state and to the region.

The financial records they have are public information -- as I understand it, they are, and you can get those. Now, whether or not you believe the audit, that' s a whole different deal, and certainly everybody is entitled to their opinion. I believe it, have no reason not to, and they are healthy, they are doing very well, and they' re looking to continue expanding that system. So that' s what I' ve seen.

MR. JOHNSON: Have you had any discussion with commissioners court, Harris County Commissioners Court?

MR. MIFFLIN: Not specifically as far as the funds being allocated to other things.

MR. JOHNSON: My sense is most of the issues that you have with the toll road authority. They' re a subset of Harris County which is governed by Harris County Commissioners Court, and I think most of your issues are there.

I agree with Robert, if we didn' t have what the toll road authority has been able to accomplish and the projects that they' re working on, plus the partnership with TxDOT, we would be awash in congestion, it would be worse than it is now which is not to our liking, but there are a lot of improvements being made now.

The basis that you arrive at in terms of the fundamentals, I think we probably differ, but I think the facts are that the toll road authority has put into its system a lot of corridor relief that has aided traffic flow and mobility in and around Harris County. And the same thing can be said for Fort Bend County. They have a toll road authority and they' ve just opened their first small toll road segment.

We heard this morning that this area is going to grow by 2.2 million people in the next 20 years and we' ve got 4.2 now. I mean, there are going to be a lot of people here to get around. We support the ideas of multimodal solutions.

My basic premise is let' s give people choices, and some of the foundation of that is whether you pay on a toll road to have consistency in driving time or drive a tax-supported road that you' re uncertain as to how long it' s going to take you. But another choice is the mode of transportation, whether it' s a light rail or commuter rail or get in your car or another form.

MR. MIFFLIN: I think the main thing that you just mentioned, too, is the choice and having the choice, and I think what some of the other speakers will probably touch on is that there is this appearance, at least, or this feeling that with HCTRA we don' t necessarily have a choice, that they come on to their projects -- not necessarily projects that they go into joint partnerships with you, but some of the more local specific projects, and they can basically work out these projects, engineer, design them, build the projects without any vote from local municipalities, that sort of thing.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, since they' re a division of Harris County government, that' s probably a true observation.

Thank you, David. Thanks for waiting so long.

We' re going to go back through those that we called out before; I see at least one face. Teresa J. Allen.

MS. ALLEN: Thank you very much for your patience. I live in Lexington Woods and we have an entrance that just drops people off into my neighborhood. So I want you to understand, first of all, I' ve been participating with the people of United To Save Our Spring, but the building of the Grand Parkway will not be bulldozing through my neighborhood. In fact, it' s not going to be inside.

So I' m coming here with a sympathy for people who will be impacted by the Grand Parkway. If it' s built, what really impacts me would be the cost of it, and I would like to see that the cost is handled prudently.

I have lived in West Berlin, I have lived in the Heidelberg area, I' ve used the mass transit systems in Athens, in London, in Kieto, in Mexico City, in Dusseldorf, London.

MR. JOHNSON: What parts of Texas are those communities in?

(General laughter.)

MS. ALLEN: I' m getting a little closer. I' ve been to D.C. In fact, just in June I spent a week with someone who worked at the Metro in Los Angeles.

MR. JOHNSON: I' ve been to Athens and Moscow, Paris.

MS. ALLEN: Have you used their public transit? I pay attention to their public transit, that' s the issue here.

And we talked a lot about partnerships today and I am concerned. Between the partnership when you think of community, it' s a combination of government, the market or free enterprise, and civic organizations. So I' ve come here as part of a civic organization that feels it' s essential that there is a place for the average citizen to participate in this process.

I would like to comment on the necessity for state laws to change in order to hold the toll road authorities accountable to the residents and municipalities that they are supposed to serve.

There has been talk of requiring HCTRA to hold public meetings for public input, as well as requiring local government approval for specific projects before it can proceed to the design and engineering phase. And I was at the meeting two days ago where they just, without any conversation, approved $5.6 million for something that I think you' ve been working on.

We must make certain that all residents in HCTRA' s service area are protected. While residents of incorporated cities such as Houston and Bellaire and West University Place will be protected by such change in state law, the larger population of residents in the unincorporated areas of the county will not. Their local municipality remains the Harris County Commissioners Court and the precinct commissioners which have proven over the past few years to not be so involved or concerned about the rights and the well-being of the constituents that they serve.

Toll road authorities have been given excessive powers, and aside from financial concerns, the lack of accountability and input from the residents and taxpayers makes it too easy for HCTRA to become a servant to developers and businesses that do not have the residents' best interests in mind.

This could allow too few people with overwhelming power or money to yield influence over the decisions that affect the lives of too many people far removed from them.

The proposed routes of Segment F-2 of the parkway have been highly controversial with every proposed route involving the destruction of homes and businesses in the Spring community. I was at a meeting of 800 people, and someone came in and put an alarm out about parking, so about 400 people left immediately when they said your car might be towed. They didn' t say might, they said your car could be towed, and so 400 people left.

There was someone there that said is anyone here for the toll road; only one person raised their hand and I don' t think they spoke very good English, so I' m not sure if they understood what was going on there.

Residents have been allowed to comment on TxDOT' s proposals and voice concerns related to health, environmental, quality of life issues. As a result of this input, TxDOT went back and is currently producing a new DEIS. I would just hope that you really assist us in a partnership where there is civic input and that as a result we have proper oversight and proper accountability.

Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you for staying so long.

MS. ALLEN: Pardon?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you for staying so long.

MS. ALLEN: Oh, my pleasure.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Yvonne Tallent?

VOICE: She left.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Robin Holzer?

MS. HOLZER: My prepared comments say good morning, but I guess that' s not true anymore, so good afternoon.

My name is Robin Holzer. I' m a community leader in the near town area of central Houston, and I am co-chair of the Citizens Transportation Coalition. Our group is working to improve transportation planning in part by increasing meaningful public participation in the planning process.

When TxDOT plans, designs and builds a new project, there' s a rigorous process involved and this process helps ensure both that environmental impacts are assessed and that citizens who will be affected by a project have multiple opportunities to share their views and make the project better.

TxDOT' s process works to make these projects better, and for many projects, this process is actually required by federal law where federal funds are involved. Further, TxDOT' s comprehensive meeting and environmental rules apply to other implementing agencies like private tolling agencies and regional mobility authorities.

In fact, it appears to me that every type of tolling authority in the state is subject to TxDOT' s great rules on these things except county toll authorities like HCTRA. In other words, most of the standard environmental and public outreach requirements that citizens like me take for granted don' t apply to the Harris County Toll Road Authority.

Because these rules don' t apply to HCTRA, I' ve learned that not only do the citizens in my neighborhood and neighborhoods like the folks in Spring and the Heights and other groups who have been here today, not only do the citizens not have a voice, but also our mayor and city council don' t have a voice.

The State Legislative Council tells us that if the city of Houston or Bellaire or one of the Memorial villages or Taylor Lake Village or Seabrook or one of those places has concerns about one of HCTRA' s dozen toll road proposals inside their city that they have no legal power to address them. This seems like a big problem to me. Why shouldn' t the biggest local stakeholders have a voice?

In the best Texas tradition, we need better local control and more public accountability for toll-funded projects. So I' m here today to ask the commission to help make all toll-funded projects, not just the ones that you guys implement but all of them, subject to the same public notice, public meeting and environmental assessment requirements that federally-funded highway projects are subject to, even if we don' t have to send them to the feds, regardless of who the implementing agency is. And I hope you' ll help.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Very good. It' s hard to be against that.

MR. JOHNSON: Let' s see, near town, where is that?

MS. HOLZER: Down 59 where those cute bridges are, the four arched bridges over the low grade section of 59, that' s near town from Shepherd east to Spur 527 and north to Allen Parkway and Memorial and that area.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Do you know my buddy Debra Danburg?

MS. HOLZER: Not personally, I have not had the pleasure but she has done some great things for our community.

MR. WILLIAMSON: She' s my buddy.

MS. HOLZER: Including making sure that the 59 reconstruction got done really well. I only hope that the rest of our neighborhoods can find champions in our local government to help do that and partner with you guys. Our concern is that some of these groups don' t have that kind of high profile support and that there are not regulations or laws in place to ensure that their voice is heard.

MR. WILLIAMSON: You are all making a pretty good argument; you' ve got all points of the compass kind of covered.

MS. HOLZER: We' re trying.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I particularly like the lady that was smiling about her neighborhood being flooded.

MS. MERCER: I was trying to give you something to laugh at. I started to say we' re not concerned about what has been built, we' re concerned about what' s going to be built.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But it was very effective; that' s a very effective communication style.

Members, comments or questions for this lady?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I want to thank you.

MS. HOLZER: Thanks.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Connie O' Donnell?

VOICE: She left.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Is it Polly or Patty, and let me make another stab, is it Ledvina?

MS. LEDVINA: My name is Polly Ledvina. I' m the spokesperson for the Katy Corridor Coalition and one of the co-chairs of the Citizens Transportation Coalition.

And at this point I can only reiterate I do appreciate that we have to turn more and more to tolling, that it makes sense. We do appreciate some of the changes in state law, actually, that allow more creative financing of other forms of transportation and that these tolls might actually be used to bring our region more in balance with alternatives. So those are all positives.

But I also have to reiterate the concern about the county toll road authority not having accountability, as they' ve all said before, to the citizens and not having to do the normal -- what we' ve come to consider normal basic environmental reviews and public participation processes.

We believe that the only way to protect communities -- and can I just hand this up and maybe you can pass it around. We' re concerned because now with all this new tolling and these plans and our 2025 Regional Transportation Plan with like a dozen new toll roads coming at us, we' re concerned that there' s going to be a lot of pressure to put toll roads through inner-city neighborhoods and we aren' t going to have adequate knowledge, adequate input in these plans.

We believe, if we get to this point, the only way to protect citizens and municipalities will be through changes in state law. And we' d like to take that route and we' d like your help and support and hope that you understand our concern and that you might help us legally secure these protections for citizens.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Maybe what we ought to do is buy HCTRA and then that would put all these toll roads under our purview.

(General laughter.)

MR. NICHOLS: I understand your concern. It sounds like you feel like you' re really lost out of the process, that we do have appreciation for the environmental process and public input, that the state does, TxDOT does, but you' re expressing concern -- that' s one common thing I hear -- about the environmental and public input process that the Harris County Toll Road Authority has.

In the request that you' re saying and I heard a couple of other times is you want more local control. The irony of that statement is that you do have local control, and what you' re requesting is more state control. You' re wanting us as a state to put a greater control on the process, whereas the total control of the process is at the local level now. Does that make sense?

MR. WILLIAMSON: No, that' s not what I hear. I hear them saying that you have a process in place that guarantees minorities within the commissioners' precincts have a say in what happens to this toll road. The Harris County Toll Authority, her only local control is to -- is Eversole your commissioner?

MS. LEDVINA: He' s not my personal one.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But that' s what you' re basically saying is that' s your only control is to call in and get his attention. And I should say we find him to be an easy guy to work with.

MS. LEDVINA: He' s not my commissioner, and I' m not talking about any commissioner --

MR. WILLIAMSON: We need to round up PIO and get this all recorded because this would be a great advertisement for us. We' ve got people coming in here and telling us you do a good job.

(General laughter.)

MR. NICHOLS: There may be some things we can do to help encourage that process.

MR. WILLIAMSON: It' s very interesting that you' ve picked up on the governor' s obvious desire to promote toll roads and use the revenue to build alternative transportation.

MS. LEDVINA: I had not picked up on that, but that' s traditional thinking and I' ve heard it said a couple of times and it' s a great idea.

MR. WILLIAMSON: That' s precisely what was in his mind -- well, what I should say it was in his mind to give communities the cash flow to make those decisions. There are some communities that are not going to want to build public transit; there are some communities that are going to want to build a lot of public transit.

MS. LEDVINA: That' s corridors like you heard the I-10 corridor. I mean, you' ve gone as far as you can with I-10. We were hoping that we could have gotten rail, actually, instead of a toll road in I-10.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We understand.

MS. LEDVINA: But it' s got to be the next increment. If we' ve got to increase the capacity again, we cannot go doubling the Katy Freeway.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Or body levitation, one of the two, our own personal suits. I think that' s what she was getting at.

MR. NICHOLS: I knew what she was getting at, but the other lady, she wanted more local control and in fact they' re not happy with the local control that you' ve got, you want to enhance the process.

(General talking.)

MS. LEDVINA: We will exercise the local control as best we can, but we want basic protection guaranteed by state law.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

Ed Browne?

MR. BROWNE: I guess the first thing is thanks for coming to Houston and giving us the opportunity to talk to you.

I am Ed Browne, live in Spring Branch. I know a lot of these people but I' m not going to take any particular coalition or civic association, I want to speak by myself so I don' t get anybody in trouble.

I want to speak on the Trans-Texas Corridor and maybe a couple of other issues if we could. One is the Trans-Texas Corridor is planned to go around Houston; right now it' s slated to be the Grand Parkway, I-69. Judge Eckels says that that' s probably not going to happen because it' s too crowded a corridor. But let' s just assume for a moment that it does.

You know much better than I do how it' s put together, but my understanding is that we' re talking about six railroad lines, freight, roadway, tollway, and utility easement. Is that correct, about a quarter-mile wide?

MR. WILLIAMSON: Or enough room to do that if that was the smartest thing to do.

MR. BROWNE: Okay.

MR. NICHOLS: Or those pieces can separate as long as they' re going basically in the same direction and they could come back together.

MR. BROWNE: I' d like to address that also, I guess.

It seems to me that the Grand Parkway is a particularly dangerous area, if you will, to put all these pieces in. And I actually have a picture here of a ruptured gas pipeline. Now, this was taken from 134-page deposition for some legal something or other, but the point being in this age of terrorism, et cetera, it seems like when you put all the utility items in there -- we' re talking about gas pipelines, oil pipelines, communication and cable, utility lines, power lines and water in the same corridor, you' re actually painting a bull' s eye on all the vital infrastructure of your city, and saying if you want to knock out a city and wreak havoc, hit this area first.

It' s even more dangerous if you, for instance, know that you' ve got a freight line with hazardous materials traveling by it at the same time you hit this gas pipeline, rupture it, and so on and so forth.

It' s actually a very broad area that this thing torched. This is relatively small, this is a 30-inch pipeline. We' re talking 36 and 42 are pretty normal.

So I doubt that that' s what you' ve got in mind for the Grand Parkway, I just don' t see that that would happen.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But the Grand Parkway could be financed by the corridor proposal, but wouldn' t necessarily look like that.

MR. BROWNE: That' s the other issue I guess I wanted to address, and that is that we see that Cintra, they' re the ones that won the contract, I guess, or you' re still in negotiation for sort of the leg of the Trans-Texas Corridor, but we also see that they' re not going to put in a rail line.

So I' m wondering is this TTC and the laws associated with it, does that allow you to basically use these new rules of eminent domain to create corridors for not just roads but for rail lines or utility easements individually and separate? Because that' s a whole different ball game than this whole corridor with everything rolled in it.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I don' t know that I ever thought about it.

MR. JOHNSON: Well, rail already has that right anyway.

MR. BROWNE: Rail does but you' ve got these rights of eminent domain, and you' ve also got very good -- in other words, you can go into an agreement with UP and take the land and lease it back to UP and give them a favorable location to put their rail line. They don' t have the capital right now to buy the land, and probably couldn' t but you could and lease it back to them.

It just looks to me like you' ve opened up Pandora' s Box. So I' d like to ask if you' d look at that, and there' s an awful lot of areas. I must have a devious mind because I could find dozens of things in the 3588 that I could twist and make a lot of money on if I were so inclined, and I could share some of those with you if you want -- I don' t think I could do it in three minutes.

Okay, that' s one issue.

Another thing that we' ve talked about, or maybe we didn' t talk about, let me bring this up first, and that is that right now we import, according to government numbers, 60 percent of our oil. In the last Regional Transportation Plan for Houston, fuel economy was not considered at all in the transportation plan.

Now, it seems to me when you import 60 percent of a finite resource material that you really need to consider alternatives to that fuel source, and let me give you an example.

Harris County did a study of the Hempstead Highway corridor, 290, and they' re looking at putting a toll road in there. They looked at also the possibility of a commuter rail line going down that corridor. There' s a rail line that' s in there that' s not used that much; they think they can run a commuter line down that.

Doesn' t it make sense from a fuel standpoint to put the commuter line in first before you widen the road and then see if you need the right of way afterwards. Because you' ve got the demand on that corridor, you' ve got people backed up and sitting in traffic, so you' ve got a natural demand. If you put the commuter line in there and people try it and realize they get downtown a whole lot quicker than they could in their cars sitting in a traffic jam, you' ve actually created, I guess, a solution and you may not even have to widen the road.

I guess from that standpoint, it seems to me that the most patriotic thing we can do is to try to figure out ways to remove ourselves from dependence on Middle East oil. So I would urge you, if there' s any way possible, to be thinking along those lines. And I may be wrong, but I don' t think transportation planning has that as a goal, and I would like to urge you to make it a goal.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

Barry Klein?

VOICE: I think he left.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Diane Stotz?

VOICE: She also left.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Tom Compson?

MR. COMPSON: Thank you. And just mentioned fuel efficiency, you can't get much more fuel efficient than a bicycle.

In a couple of months, April 16 and 17 is the annual MS-150 bike ride from Houston to Austin. If you ever doubt how many people are interested in bikes around here, just take a look at 12,000 bike riders going from here to Austin and it' s a pretty impressive sight.

Between now and then many of those riders, including me, will be trying to get ourselves in shape -- you know, it' s 180 miles. So we go out on the county roads, we go out on some state routes to do that, most of the time without incident, unfortunately sometimes not.

It' s a great time of the year to be riding. Wildflower season and most of the routes are amenable to that, but some routes aren' t. And I guess all I' m mentioning it here for is to raise to your attention to the extent that you can incorporate accommodations for bikes when you' re building new roads or you' re expanding or improving existing ones, a lot of times all it takes is two or three feet of shoulder, just so we can be out of the way of cars.

And I' m a driver too so it can be an irritation, obviously, if you have someone poke along on their bike. I don' t want to be that irritation, I don' t want to be in people' s way. I' d just raise that to your attention.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We hear from bikers a lot across the state -- bicyclists.

MR. COMPSON: Both, I' m sure. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, Tom.

Mark Quakenbush?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: That concludes our open comment period. Anything else, members?

MR. HOUGHTON: Yes. There' s somebody outside that wanted me to do this for the home boy.

MR. JOHNSON: I move we adjourn.

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: That' s a privileged motion. If you can get a second, I can' t prevent a vote.

MR. HOUGHTON: I suppose since you are the home boy, you get the honor.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, then one, two, three.

(All sang Happy Birthday to Mr. Johnson, followed by applause.)

MR. JOHNSON: I need someone to second my motion.

MR. WILLIAMSON: There's still a highly privileged motion on the table.

MR. HOUGHTON: I'll second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: There's a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion to adjourn will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: We are adjourned as of 1:54 p.m.

(Whereupon, at 1:54 p.m., the meeting was concluded.)

C E R T I F I C A T E

MEETING OF: Texas Transportation Commission
LOCATION: Houston, Texas
DATE: January 27, 2005

I do hereby certify that the foregoing pages, numbers 1 through 200, inclusive, are the true, accurate, and complete transcript prepared from the verbal recording made by electronic recording by Sue J. Brindley before the Texas Department of Transportation.

__________02/01/2005
(Transcriber) (Date)
On the Record Reporting, Inc.
3307 Northland, Suite 315
Austin, Texas 78731