The Houston Chronicle reports that the Texas Transportation Commission has asked for a new study on a vehicle-miles-traveled tax.
Texas transportation officials say the study is meant to help give lawmakers information on options ahead of their next regular session in 2011, when they confront a funding squeeze that is expected to drain the highway fund of money for new construction contracts by 2012.
“We need to think differently about how we fund transportation,” Texas Transportation Commission Chairwoman Deirdre Delisi said at a Texas Taxpayers and Research Association forum in November.
The Dallas Morning News reports on efforts by the Texas Transportation Commission to build a new privately financed toll road in the Dallas area within the more restrictive rules set in the last session by the state Legislature.
The commission told its staff to submit plans by January for how to fast-track a roughly $4 billion expansion of Interstate 35E between Dallas and Denton. Officials say the project is a prime candidate for a new kind of financing that they concede looks a lot like the private toll deals ruled out by the Legislature.
“We’ve got to use all of these innovative ways of building highways or we won’t be building,” said commission member Ted Houghton of El Paso in an interview Friday. “It’s a fact of life. If you want us to build roads, then we are going to move forward using these kinds of tools.”
The tool in question is called pass-through toll financing, and is different, though not very, from the private toll deals lawmakers have put on ice.
Texas’ top transportation official, the chairwoman of the Texas Transportation Commission, forcefully defended the department’s pursuit of private toll roads in an unusually direct speech in Irving today, reports the transportation blog of the Dallas Morning News.
Dallas news station WFAA reports that the American Automobile Association’s Texas chapter wants an independent investigation into the impact that new car pool lanes on three freeways on seven motorist deaths.
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