Morris gets 3 votes of confidence

Michael Morris ruffled feathers during months of tense negotiations over Texas 161 toll road, which is now being built near the Grand Prairie-Arlington border. But a lot of the region’s elected officials say they've got his back.

“We just want to squash any thoughts of unhappiness about the job he’s doing,” Burleson Mayor Ken Shetter said after the Tarrant Regional Transportation Coalition this week passed a resolution of support for Morris’ work. Members of that coalition, along with the Regional Transportation Council and Dallas Regional Mobility Coalition, said they wanted to respond quickly to behind-the-scenes threats to have Morris removed from his long-held position as transportation director of the North Central Texas Council of Governments. All three agencies passed resolutions thanking Morris for his three decades of work as a regional planner and advocate.

Several sources said the resolutions were necessary because some Collin County officials were quietly unhappy with the deals Morris helped negotiate for Texas 121 and 161, a pair of toll roads that together will generate more than $3.7 billion for other Metroplex projects -- and were gauging support for a possible coup.

During months of negotiations over the past year, Morris pressed the North Texas Tollway Authority, which ultimately won the rights to build both roads, to pay the highest amount possible in exchange for the rights to collect tolls. As a result, hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been freed up to spend on other roads, but force the Plano-based tollway authority to issue more debt than it wanted.

The sources didn’t identify the conspirators by name. Collin County Commissioner Joe Jaynes said Thursday he was unaware of the anti-Morris sentiment. Tollway chairman Paul Wageman of Plano said of Morris: “The report I got was that Michael played a constructive role.”