Watson puts forth a dark theory

February 6, 2008

By Ben Wear, Austin American-Statesman

I’d heard this theory bobbing around the local transportation scene. Today, state Sen. Kirk Watson put it out there from the dais of a legislative committee room.

It goes like this: TxDOT promised Austin leaders about $900 million last fall for a five-road tollway plan to get them to approve the $1.45 billion plan. With that promise in hand, the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board put those tollways into what is called the Transportation Improvement Plan, or TIP. You can’t build a road unless it’s in that TIP, and you can’t build it as a tollway unless it’s in the plan as a tollway.

Then, just a few weeks later, TxDOT said, oops, we were wrong and now don’t know how much (if any) of that money we’ll be able to give you.

But the tollways are now in the plan. The plan is agnostic about where the money to build the roads comes from. It could, for instance, come from, say, Spain, rather than the state treasury.

“I believe part of what TxDOT did to Austin is to get toll roads into the TIP so you can privatize them,” Watson said, referring to TxDOT management’s fondness for reaching long-term leases with private companies to build and then operate toll road projects. If they ever try to do that, however, Watson, who is chairman of the CAMPO board, said he’d make sure the roads came out of the TIP before they can.

Watson made the comments at a joint hearing of the Senate committees that oversee the state budget and transportation.

A pretty strong allegation, to be sure. TxDOT officials, including executive director Amadeo Saenz and Texas Transportation Commisison members Hope Andrade and Ted Houghton were sitting there when Watson said this. Houghton had just been talking about how there 87 projects around the state that might be ripe for privatization, including some in Austin.

The TxDOT folks didn’t respond directly to the Machiavillian charge.

“We do indeed want to work with you,” said Andrade, named last week as interim chairman of the commission after Ric Williamson’s death. “We have several (financing) tools that you gave us, and we want to use them.”