See website below: Read about the double tax, stop double tax with one dual automatic email to ALL 23 CAMPO BOARD MEMBERS & 5 TTC members and tell a friend all in one site!

http://www.stopdoubletax.com

FYI: Look for Austin Statesman - Sunday 13th & Chronicle 17th - 3/4 page ''Highway Robbery'' ad!

Sal Costello
People for Efficient Transportation
txpetmail@aol.com

AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Commentary: Sal Costello
Speak up before it's too late to stop this toll road scheme

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Friday, June 11, 2004
In the past few years, special interests and lobbyists have successfully manipulated the laws that govern our transportation system -- for their own benefit. Today, those new laws come home to Austin, which is the ''testing ground'' for a radical toll road plan that national trade publications call ''the possible future of tolling schemes.''

The Texas Department of Transportation presents its plan as if it's not any different from those in other cities. But this financial scheme has never been done before. The department even hired a California legal and lobbying firm to help cook it up. I call it the ''Double Tax Toll Plan,'' and it is unusual in several ways:

* It uses more than $4.5 billion future taxpayer dollars, hundreds of millions of which could be diverted from schools, to finance toll roads. (Refer to House Bill 2.)
* TxDOT will use those billions to finance toll roads that we can't drive on -- unless we pay again. That is a double tax.
* The proposal calls for seizing tens of millions of dollars of our taxpayer financed roads in Austin and converting them into toll roads.

There are only four road conversions that transportation officials will tell us about:
* Texas 71 from Interstate 35 to Riverside Drive, the road leading to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. That would take $43.8 million taxpayer dollars.
* The MoPac (Loop 1) bridge at William Cannon Drive. That takes $8.3 million taxpayer dollars.
* Ed Bluestein Boulevard from I-35 to Springdale Road. It takes $50.5 million taxpayer dollars.
* Texas 45, southeast from I-35 to U.S. 183. TxDOT takes unknown millions of tax dollars.

Shockingly, this toll proposal also takes our taxpayer financed roads and turns them over to those who will operate them for a profit -- at our expense.

Bob Daigh, the Austin district engineer for TxDOT, is telling the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization to vote on the toll proposal next month, before another city takes the money from the mobility fund, a special state fund for building highways. To date, the fund has less than $30 million in it.

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AMERICAN-STATESMAN II


TxDOT's Metropolitan Mobility publication from 2003 lists the criterion to qualify a metropolitan area for mobility money. There is no mention of ''first come, first serve.'' Besides, how can our elected officials of CAMPO even vote on a proposal that has no traffic or revenue studies? Imagine someone asking you to finance a business plan -- only to find out he had no business plan.

A decision as large as this one affects the future of Central Texas transportation forever. The toll roads will never go away, even after the roads are paid for 20 times over.

Publicly, TxDOT says drivers will always have the choice of using free-access roads. But the facts speak otherwise. A newly discovered TxDOT internal presentation reveals a plan to force all of us onto toll roads.

In TxDOT's 2003 ''Toll Finance 101,'' by James Bass, the department's finance director, it says: ''Limiting the alternatives (supply): 1) free alternatives mean lower revenues; 2) avoid frontage roads or use discontinuous frontage roads; 3) don't overbuild; 4) limit competing facilities; 5) consider legal and mobility issues.'' One can only assume that if the toll plan is passed in Austin, TxDOT will build toll roads from now on -- because it can.

There is nothing reasonable about this plan. TxDOT created our traffic problems by failing to properly design and maintain the transportation infrastructure in this state, delaying the construction of highway improvements for which money has been available for years. Then it tells us that we are in a traffic crisis with only one solution -- toll roads.

And these are toll roads that will require us to saddle future generations with an enormous debt. Forty years from now, when those bonds are retired, many of us won't be around to see them wrestle with the problem. More the shame for all of us.

CAMPO, made up mostly of your elected officials, is taking public input on this vital issue until June 25. E-mail them at campo@campotexas.org today -- and tell them not to vote for a plan that double-taxes us and turns over our roads to unnamed corporations.

www.StopDoubleTax.com

Campo meeting/hearing

While CAMPO did not have a hearing on the new Mobility Plan - what they call Agenda item #4 (and what you recall as the conversion of local Austin highways into Toll Roads). However, that did not stop Ed Scruggs from CCHOA or Mrs Peterson from Shady Hollow HOA, from speaking out in the Citizen's communication period at the end of the meeting. In fact, they made some execellent presentations and a few new details were added to the picture.

TxDOT representative, Bob Daigh, continued to stammer and studder and dance around every direct question that was put to him by the CAMPO members or speakers from the floor. Either that man is an ass or he's just used to TxDOT politics (for example, sure Hwy 71 is funded for the new lanes at the Y.... How many years have you heard that from TxDOT engineer, one after the other ?)


The truth is, the mobility plan is shot full of holes, like anything else that was thrown together in a hurry. Our only mistake, as an HOA, is not investigating that plan further and coming out against the whole thing.

Now, CAMPO leaders are acting as if we are ONLY concerned about the William Cannon bridge, and I think that's a very narrow point of view. They have escentially used the ''Not in My Backyard'' phrase, to label us as whiners out in the suburbs.

We are in trouble, here, today, with CAMPO. They are claiming that the opposition and support for the Mobility Toll road convesion plan is 50:50 today. If they really think that, they will go ahead and approve it on July 12th and we can't do anything else but pay for Toll roads from now on, just to drive around on Austin highways and roads that have been free for the past 80 years.


YOU HAVE TO CONTACT CAMPO and tell them you are NOT happy with this short-sighed and very, very expensive road building plan.

Tell CAMPO you CAN NOT SUPPORT AGENDA ITEM #4

Deadlline for comment is June 25 - next Friday.

CAMPO PHONE: 974-2275

Please call or write them TODAY, or else go to the www.TxPET.org web site and use their email form on-line. (see their full page add in last Sunday's news paper, the METRO section, page B7)

board@campotexas.org


CAMPO is a good organization that has made good choices for us in the past, but the members from Williamson County and Hays County, plus members from Round Rock and Leander, ARE GOING TO VOTE FOR THIS bad plan.

These Tolls don't hit them in the pocketbook, but if you drive to work, to the airport, to UT, or anywhere past William Cannor Drive, your free drive is about to be over. Think about paying $10 to drive someone to the airport, just in Tolls. And guess what, that road will be just as crowded as it is today, because there is no relief at the end of the road - we all just end up at the same narrow bottlencks.

This is not the tranportation plan that Austin needs. We do need more road lanes, we do need Toll Roads, but we also need Mass Transportation that works for us on our schedules and we need a lot more.