Krusee will give toll ban a committee hearing

April 5, 2007

By Ben Wear, AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The private toll road moratorium will get its day in a House committee.

State Rep. Mike Krusee, R-Williamson County, said Wednesday evening that if SB 1267, the moratorium bill, reaches the House, he will bring it up in the House Transportation Committee. Krusee, a consistent supporter of giving the Texas Department of Transportation broad powers to create toll roads, chairs that committee.

“If it comes out of the Senate, I will give it a hearing in the House,” Krusee said. “However, I continue to think it’s a mistake to take away our cities’ only tool for building new infrastructure without giving them a replacement tool such as gas tax indexing, or more money from the state budget.”

The moratorium bill would actually take away just one tool for addressing highway needs — long-term leases with private companies to build and operate toll roads — and would do so for just two years. And the bill, as amended Wednesday in a Senate committee before that panel passed it, would exempt most projects currently on the cusp of reaching agreements. Even if the bill becomes law, the state and local toll road agencies would still be able to plan and build toll roads.

Krusee, as he did in 2005, has introduced a bill in the House to allow the state’s 20-cent-a-gallon gas tax to float upward with the consumer price index. That bill was heard in the House Ways and Means Committee in late February, but has not been brought up since for a committee vote.

State Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, sponsor of SB 1267, served from 1997 to 2005 on the Texas Transportation Commission where he was a staunch supporter of the state’s emerging reliance on toll roads to expand highway capacity. The House sponsor is state Rep. Lois Kolkhorst, R-Brenham, who has more than 110 co-sponsors in that 150-member body.