Honkin' Mad

Tollway authority votes to take over Southwest Parkway, Texas 161

PLANO -- Future traffic improvement in southern Tarrant County and northern Johnson County is now firmly in the control of the North Texas Tollway Authority. 

After years of negotiations, the tollway board on Friday voted to take over and jointly finance two Metroplex highway projects -- Texas 161 under construction east of Arlington, and the proposed 28-mile Southwest Parkway from I-30 near downtown Fort Worth to U.S. 67 in Cleburne.

The Texas 161 project is clearly further along. The 8-1 vote included authorizing a $458 million payment to the state to take over Texas 161 project, which includes covering the cost of construction that has begun on the toll road, which is already a popular route to Cowboys Stadium.

Several steps remain before the tollway authority can officially take the reins of the Southwest Parkway project, which is undergoing a federal environmental assessment and may not be under construction until early 2011.

But the tollway authority can now tap into the state's gas taxes for loans it may need over the next several decades to make these toll road projects work.

Still, several tollway board members were reluctant supporters of the arrangement, saying they didn't know how the once-cash flush agency could add much more to its already burdensome $7 billion debt load.

However, they noted, the alternative would be to give Dallas-Fort Worth motorists no new roads, since the Texas Department of Transportation does not have the gas tax-supported cash flow to build everything it needs.

"I believe we are doing what we never should have done, which is become a primary provider of transportation rather than a supplemental provider," lamented tollway vice chairman Victor Vandergriff of Arlington. "I'm fearful that when people come to us to build 170, 360, we will not have the resources to do it. But from a regional perspective I think we're making the right choice."

Tollway board member Michael Nowels of Lewisville added: "I'm convinced these projects are needed for our region. I think we have an obligation to step up."

The lone vote against the project was tollway board member Bill Moore of Plano, who opposed the deal philosophically and was critical of an 11th-hour demand made by the Texas Department of Transportation that the tollway authority pay a fee and interest for any funds borrowed using the state's gas tax as collateral after the 10th year of the deal.

-- Gordon.

Southwest Parkway can generate a $15 surplus

The proposed Southwest Parkway toll road could generate an amazing $15 billion surplus from 2033 to 2063.

But finding the money to get started on the project is a tough sell in 2010. Click on the chart below and look at all the green. That's all the cash that will be available from tolls collected on the road after the construction debts, operation and maintenance costs and other expenses have been taken care of. You can see there's essentially no green in the first 20 years, but a whole lot of it after that.

 

State's move could kill Southwest Parkway, Texas 161 deal

The Texas Transportation Commission on Wednesday approved a deal for the North Texas Tollway Authority to take over the Southwest Parkway and Texas 161 toll roads, but not before including last-minute language that could spoil the agreement and potentially delay both projects.

The commission, which oversees the Texas Department of Transportation, unanimously agreed to financially help the tollway authority build Texas 161. In doing so, the commission put up the state’s gas tax fund as collateral, which the tollway authority could then tap into to pay debts on both projects, at a maximum of $4.118 billion.

Southwest Parkway would be a 28-mile toll road from Interstate 30 near downtown Fort Worth to U.S. 67 in Cleburne, where the project is known as Chisholm Trail. Texas 161 would run parallel to Texas 360 in Arlington and is considered a key route to Cowboys Stadium. The Southwest Parkway/Chisholm Trail and Texas 161 projects would be built jointly and share revenue until both were paid for.

But in approving the measure Wednesday, the commission included language that would require the tollway authority to pay a fee of up to $12 million a year beginning in year 11 of the deal, if by that time the state’s gas taxes were still needed to guarantee debt. The tollway authority also would have to pay interest on money owed to the transportation department. Last week, tollway authority chairman Paul Wageman of Plano expressed concern that such language could “blow up” the agreement.

The drama now shifts to Friday, when the North Texas Tollway Authority board will meet in Plano and decide whether to accept the state’s deal. The effort to decide which agency should build the roads, each of which has been planned for decades, has now dragged on for more than three years.

During Wednesday's commission meeting, the vote was unanimous, even though transportation commissioner Bill Meadows of Fort Worth unsuccessfully tried to remove the language requiring interest payments.

“It’s a partnership between two public agencies,” Meadows said. “The whole notion of having a revenue price, a revenue sharing fee, is not appropriate.”

But commissioner Ned Holmes of Houston, who pressed for the last-minute change, said that not charging fees and interest to the tollway authority “is basically free money for 34 years. Would that be fair to the rest of the Fund 6 contributors around the state? I don’t think it is.”

The commission meeting was held in Austin and broadcast live online at www.txdot.gov.

-- Gordon.

820 Rufe Snow bottleneck is notorious

Northeast Loop 820, which is scheduled to be rebuilt beginning later this year, is once again home to one of the worst bottlenecks in the U.S.

Pothole patrol in Arlington

A high-tech approach to ridding the streets of those bothersome pocks.

No federal funding for Fort Worth streetcars?

UPDATED at 10:40 a.m.

GRAPEVINE -- The proposal to bring back streetcars to central Fort Worth may have been snubbed in its effort to win federal stimulus funds, Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley said.

Fort Worth and Dallas submitted a $96 million joint application for federal TIGER grant funds for their respective streetcar programs -- and on Wednesday (the first anniversary of the Recovery Act) Dallas was awarded $23 million.

Fort Worth got zilch, Whitley said. However, Whitley said officials were still checking into whether the money can be used for streetcar planning in both cities. The award actually goes to the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the official planning body for the whole region.

If Fort Worth doesn't get a slice of the pie, Whitley said the culprit would be petty politics. Tarrant County is SLIGHTLY redder than Democrat-blue Dallas County. He said it was time for people in both parties to start working together to solve transportation problems.

"You happen to be in the reddest of counties," Whitley told about 500 people at the Northeast Tarrant County Transportation Summit Wednesday morning in Grapevine. "The only county redder than Tarrant County in the U.S. is Orange County in California. The happenstance that we were eliminated I'm sure is coincidental. We've got to stop the partisanship. We've got to start going what's best for the region, and stop putting up with this ..."

One other explanation may be that the award was meant for both cities, but that Dallas was the only city listed ... perhaps an oversimplification, often held by many nonresidents that the entire North Texas region is "Dallas."

In Fort Worth, the idea would be to reconnect the downtown area with the museum district and medical district with electrified streetcars -- modernized versions of the trolleys that were removed from the area decades ago.

-- Gordon.

Debt, stimulus money key for $1 billion Grapevine road work

About 500 people are in Grapevine this morning for the official groundbreaking of the DFW Connector, the $1 billion makeover of the Texas 114/121 corridor.

Texas Transportation Commission member Bill Meadows of Fort Worth was one of the first speakers during an early morning Northeast Tarrant County Transportation Summit. Like many people, he's excited about the beginning of the four-year project in a corridor where about a quarter-million motorists per day.

But Meadows cautioned that the DFW Connector project is an example of a dangerous path transportation planners are taking. In an era when elected officials don't want to raise taxes to pay for roads, and revenues generated by gas taxes are on the decline because of increased fuel efficiency, many big projects are being paid for with debt and toll revenue to make ends meet.

The DFW Connector includes $250 million in stimulus funding, and $107 million in Proposition 14 funds that must be repaid over about 20 years by future gas tax revenues. There's also $667 million in gas-tax supported revenue. But ...

"Funds for this project were derived from debt, which is not sustainable, and the stimulus funding, which is not sustainable," Meadows said during the summit at the Grapevine Convention Center.

Meadows noted that a recent legislative report concluded that the Texas Department of Transportation would run out of money for new road work by 2013, although some skeptics have disputed that such a doomsday scenario would occur so soon.

But whatever year the state runs out of money, he said, the point is that the state will eventually run out of gas tax revenues, and will be forced to consider other taxing sources.

"At some point in the very near future, TxDot is not going to be able to fund any new tranportation projects forr expanding capacity in the state of Texas," Meadows said. "It's possible the resources will not even be sufficient for maintenance. We will see a deterioration of the system. In ancient civilizations one of the most fundamental elements they had was a system of transportation."

-- Gordon.

$1 billion Texas highway project begins

The DFW Connector mega-road project, which involves rebuilding seven Grapevine highways, is underway: