I don't understand it; to me it's wilder than a Friday night in an Old West saloon.

This is about El Pasoan Ted Houghton, a Texas transportation commissioner, telling us that our state road money went to projects in Houston, San Antonio and Dallas.

This goes back to just more than a year ago. We were trying to figure out creative ways to get roads built around here -- a truck-bypass parkway in Northeast and a southern relief route, which would finally finish off Loop 375. Somebody was saying, "toll roads for everybody." Others were saying, "no stinkin' toll roads."

Now, if you follow El Paso politics, you realize nobody sits down and agrees on a plan we can take to Austin as a team. We do it the Old West way. So one of our state representatives, Joe Pickett, cracked the piano chair over Houghton's head. And county Judge Anthony Cobos rammed Sen. Eliot Shapleigh with a poker table.

Meanwhile, some of the regular bar patrons heckled the saloon's entertainer, mayor and guitarist John Cook. "We don't need no stinkin' toll roads," they chanted while Cook was strumming to Roger Miller's "King of the Road."

It was a sight, all right. Everybody was John Wayne. Except Cook, who was Gene Autry.

Shapleigh was saying, "There will not be enough transportation funding unless we work diligently to ge ne rate it." That might mean tolling all or some of the new highway lanes.

Cook was all for a regional mobility authority, which could use creative-type funding to get needed roadways built now. It might well mean tolling.

Pickett said there were other options instead of entering into private toll road contracts. He could wring it out of the Texas Department of Transportation, those miserable, El Paso-hating, dirty, rotten ...

Cobos? That was the time period the newly installed county judge was trying to conquer Fabens to the New Mexico line and rename it the Holy Cobos Empire. But nobody was promising to name him road emperor, so he was out to kill the mobility authority.

With Pickett playing Don Quixote and trying to slay TxDOT, and Cobos at war with everybody else ... well, that's where everybody stood on the issue of getting road money.

And time ticked on.

Then two weeks ago word came out of Austin that El Paso stood to lose about $120 million meant for road projects over the next 10 years.

Houghton, our guy on the Texas Transportation Commission, said the money went to other cities because El Paso was not ready with a plan. There wasn't a Pickett plan agreed upon by Shapleigh-Cook. Pickett wasn't at the Shapleigh-Cook table, either.

That's where it gets confusing. We could build roads if we used creative money-raising measures, such as tolling new lanes, but not existing lanes. But wait, we could get money without having to toll.

Cannot. Can. Cannot. Can.

All right, darn it, here's a barstool upside your miserable head ... WHAP.

Then we heard Pickett saying: "Now TxDOT is saying there's no money. Where did it go?"

And Houghton was saying, "Unfortunately, El Paso was not ready with a project (to show the Texas Transportation Commission)."

And Pickett was saying, "They're pulling the asphalt rug from underneath our feet."

And Houghton was saying, "We're all culpable in this deal."

BONG!

Hey, who smashed Cook's guitar with that beer bottle? He had the right idea with "King of the Road" -- then we daddled and Austin changed it to "Hit the Road, Jack."

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