Carona to unveil toll road bill

Proposal would change balance of power between state,
private toll road operators.

April 17, 2007

Ben Wear, AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Dozens of bills seeking to curb the state's tollway powers have been introduced this session, and some of them have even progressed down the legislative highway.

But the real action in transportation begins Wednesday morning, when state Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, will unveil what he is calling the Transportation Reformation Act. What it is, at 95 pages, is a complete substitute bill for dummy language previously filed as SB 1929.

What it contains is a little bit of everything, including language from different senators' bills that in some cases contradicts other provisions in the same bill.

For instance, it includes the much-ballyhooed two-year moratorium on private toll road leases that has already reached the Senate floor and passed the House as an amendment to another toll road bill. But the bill elsewhere limits to $10 billion the amount of private toll road leases the Texas Department of Transportation can agree to through 2009.

In part, this reflects the thinking of Carona, chairman of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee and instigator of what has become a full-fledged backlash toward the Transportation Department on toll roads. Carona signed on as a co-sponsor of the moratorium bill, SB 1267, and voted for it in committee. But he supported it more as a shot across the bow of the Transportation Department, not as policy, and now says it shouldn't become law.

Carona has been working on a starter version of the legislation for several weeks with representatives of the Transportation Department and Gov. Rick Perry, and with state Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County, chairman of the House Transportation Committee. Krusee, who authored the 2003 and 2005 bills that Carona's legislation would temper, said last week that SB 1929, rather than his House twin bill, HB 3783, would be the vehicle for major transportation law this session.

As currently written, Carona's substitute, aside from the two-year moratorium (with exceptions for some Dallas-Fort Worth road projects and for El Paso County) would:

• Limit what the state might have to pay private toll road operators when the state builds nearby free roads that draw traffic (and therefore revenue) away from the toll road. The legislation would stipulate that any roads more than four miles from the tollway would not be subject to compensation. And even for roads within that 8-mile-wide competition zone, the legislation narrowly restricts the circumstances in which such compensation would be triggered, allowing exceptions for any project that contributes to safety or improves operations of other nearby state roads.

And the legislation would require that the private tollway operator pay the state compensation if a state project improves traffic and revenue on the private tollway.

• Cap the length of private toll road contracts at 40 years, down from the current 50- to 70-year allowable lease terms.

• Make it a crime (a Class A misdemeanor) for any Texas Transportation Commission member or certain ranking Transportation Department engineers to accept a monetary benefit from people who are subject to regulation by the department or who might be interested in agency contracts.

• Require that private toll road contracts have provisions setting a formula for the state to buy back the road before the contract ends. And it would require that the formula not include calculations of future toll revenue, instead basing the buyback price on money invested by the private company and a reasonable rate of return.

• Allow the Transportation Department to designate truck-only lanes on state highways.

• Ban toll road conversions, in which the state takes an existing free road and without expanding capacity makes it a tollway. This would not apply to the roads that have been causing controversy in Austin because those projects involve adding tollway express lanes and maintaining the free capacity through frontage roads.

Current law allows conversions if the public approves the change in an election.