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.

Go to the Houston Chronicle to see the entire article.

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.

Go to the Dallas Morning News to see the entire article.

Deirdre Delisi said without private capital Texas and Washington both will soon stop building the roads Texas and America needs. She cited success in Austin, where new toll roads have been built with tax dollars paying only a fraction of their costs, and in Houston and Dallas. North Texas, she said, is “the national laboratory for transportation solutions.”

Read the full item on the Dallas Morning News’ transportation blog.