A bumpy road

June 8, 2008

EDITORIAL: Star-Telegram

The Sunset Advisory Commission's scathing staff report on the Texas Department of Transportation, issued Tuesday, centers around one crucial statement: This agency has sunk so low in the eyes of the Legislature and the public that trust can only be restored through dramatic action.

"[T]weaking the status quo is simply not enough," says the report.

The prescribed solution is to abolish the five-member Texas Transportation Commission. The governor would appoint a single commissioner to run the department with oversight from a special committee of legislators. During the next four years, the Transportation Department would extensively revise its policies and procedures.

That's dramatic, all right. But is it really necessary?

Mistakes were made

You can sum up the department's problems in two words: toll roads.

In 2002, Gov. Rick Perry's Trans Texas Corridor proposal, aimed at improving Texans' mobility through a series of privately built toll roads, was new and unique. But the idea grew to a long list of proposals. The more that many Texans learned about the concept, the more they hated it.

Ric Williamson of Weatherford, as chairman of the Transportation Commission and with Perry's support, championed private toll roads as the only way that the state could get the money it needed to build essential roads -- right up until his death late last year. But, right or wrong, his powerful advocacy and his aggressive methods rubbed many people the wrong way.

By 2007, the Legislature imposed a moratorium on new private toll road contracts, with a handful of exceptions.

It didn't help when Williamson and the Transportation Department announced that the state had a $1.1 billion shortfall and would have to shift money away from rural road maintenance to urban road construction. Then, under questioning from a legislative committee, department officials said that was a mistake -- a bookkeeping error.

There's a solution

So things really don't look very good for the department and its governing commission. Their legislative and public opponents have, almost literally, gathered like an angry mob.

Fortunately, an orderly process is going on here. The Sunset Advisory Commission, created in 1977, reviews about 130 state agencies on a 12-year cycle. Tuesday's report, the result of months of work by sunset staff members, is but one early step.

The Transportation Department has filed a self-evaluation, and it will have a chance to respond to the staff report. The Sunset Commission, composed of five senators (including Kim Brimer of Fort Worth), five House members and two public members, will hold a hearing and take public testimony. That hearing is scheduled for July 15.

The commission can decide that the agency should simply go away, but that's unlikely. Usually, a bill is introduced in the next legislative session continuing the agency's operation, either along the lines of what the staff has suggested or on some different track that emerges in hearings or deliberations. Sunset bills usually become the subject of extensive legislative debate.

Don't get distracted

Sunset review has served Texas well during the past 31 years and has helped to improve state government. There is every reason to believe that the review of the Transportation Department will do the same.

It is far too early for the department's opponents to declare victory -- or for its supporters to feel defeated. This debate has a long way to go.

It's crucial for everyone involved to remember that this debate, however it is resolved, deals only with the administrative structure and procedures of the agency responsible for building Texas roads. Even if that agency were to go away, its job would remain and would have to be done somewhere in state government.

The more difficult and important question is how to pay for those roads. Let's not get so caught up in shuffling around the pieces of an administrative bureaucracy that we fail to face this significant problem of road costs and properly resolve it.