THANK YOU ROGER BAKER FOR THIS REPORT AND PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT!
Where is Sen. Kirk Watson headed? Not where TxDOT wants to go by tolling every new road -- thats for sure. Watson now has gotten strong control over CAMPO and has managed to put TxDOT's phase 2 toll roads on hold, for now.
He sought and got strong personal control over CAMPO at their last meeting. Watson is also on the Senate Transportation Committee. He just had an op-ed editorial in the Jan. 29 Statesman about the need for a new and much more open policy, but cautioned against the
expectation of "free" roads.
His new task force to examine CAMPO policy is NOT stacked with road warriors, as almost all other groups in this area linked to CAMPO and TxDOT have typically been. The task force group has a sprinkling of those, but it may even give the edge to reformers. Replogle is a very
smart transpo reform activist from DC and spoke up repeatedly at the meeting (with stuff that I would tend to agree with). My take is that the group, and Watson's aim, is designed to restore public credibility in Texas transportation planning as the dollars shrink.
Here is his group:
Sen. Watson, Texas Senate District 14
Cynthia Long, Williamson County Commissioner, pct 2 (western part)
David Ellis, Texas Transportation Institute
Greg Marshall, Marshall Group consulting company and Alliance for
Public Transportation
Betty Dunkerly, Austin City Council mayor
Frank Fernandez, House the Homeless
John Trube, Mayor of Buda in Hays county
Sarah Eckhardt, (progressive) new Travis County Commissioner, pct 2
Michael Replogle, transportation expert on Environmental Defense Fund
Gerald Daugherty, Travis County Commissioner, pct 3
-- Roger]
Watson’s first CAMPO Mobility Financing Task Force Meeting, at the Capitol, Jan. 29, 2007. The meetings will be three hours long and the next meetings, all open to the public, are scheduled for Feb. 9, Feb. 23, March 12, and March 26.
Below is a fairly accurate, if not perfect, transcript of the end of meeting remarks by Sen. Kirk Watson (who had who had just returned from voting in the Senate an hour after after starting the initial meeting of the transportation task group he had picked.
At the first of the meeting Watson spoke of the public hostility that CAMPO and TxDOT had created by trying to impose toll roads on the community using a closed process until they had "dug ourselves into hole" -- turning everything into a toll road debate with polarization and no shades of gray, instead of a broader and more open process that he saw as necessary to defuse hostility and restore public confidence in the federally sanctioned publ.ic planning process that allocates federal funds. (Now the Texas Senate chaired by Sen. Corona from Dallas and with vice chair Watson appear ready to challenge the TxDOT bureaucracy appointed by Gov. Perry, and who favor toll roads as the major solution to road funding problems.)
Subsequently at the meeting TxDOT gave an unusually candid report (quite out of character for TxDOT) with a lot of facts and figures that underlined the fact that they had gotten themselves addicted to deficit financing to try to chase current and future projected travel demand (this was done with full federal approval). Now they have dug themselves in so deep that they could use up ALL TxDOT’s money doing nothing but maintaining existing roads; they see themselves as $100 million short of needs in District 10 alone:
Bob Daigh: “We (TxDOT) could spend all our state and federal money on maintenence”
(They've dug themselves into a hole that it has now led to trying to privatize and sell off Texas travel corridors to the highest foreign bidders using long term leases, in accord with Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan. Meanwhile the federal highwat trust fund money is drying up, scheduled to drop to no added money by 2010, maintenance costs are rising fast, and energy costs are soaring. TxDOT is in deep deep trouble if they can’t keep on on borrowing money to go on building roads, which they have been assuming must be toll roads for this reason.)
Watson (having just come back to the meeting and responding to complaint from Dunkerly that they don’t have important growth planning tools outside the cities for the SH 130 corridor,etc):
“ It is probable that there are tools we don’t have. But to emphasize something the mayor pro-tem (Betty Dunkerly) just said, we have a real obligation, I think, to do something NOW to address the problems. I think that takes on two or three tasks; one is what from a practical standpoint can we do in the next year, two years, five years, ten years? Second is, and I happen to be a big believer that all the tools ought to be in the tool box, the ones we talk about
daily in this place and the ones that we don’t, and then that leads us to the question of what from a practical perspective will be available to us one year, two years, five years, ten years and beyond. And then leads to the question of part of what as I see as a framework for analysis which would be if I’m having to make decisions today about something I’m going to do, then that wqould actually play a role in what my matrix is and if its not something that is available to me now, and CAN’T be available for one reason or another for a period of time, I’m not going to take that into consideration on a vote today, but I think it is appropriate for us in our scope of work to try to think through why are certain things are not availble to us and can we make them available but always being practical about what our ultimate goal is, which is that we’re going to have to address our transportation needs.
“And I appologize that I’ve missed a chunk of meeting and don’t really know where we are in this whole thing, but if what we’re talking about is the scope of work aspect, I think ultimately its not about defining our mission in such a way we say are today going to seek out this type of transportation solution or that type. I go back to my opening comments which is that right now what I hope we do is we wipe the slate clean, we bring our experience and our intelligence
and our passion to it, and our education, but we don’t right now say that we’re prejudgethe outcome. But instead what we do is say lets put together the best-in-the country’s process, including all the appropriate decision points that a good Metropolitan Planning Organization would utilize, so that then when we consider any tools, we’ll come out with good decisions.
Watson then recognizes Travis County Commissioner Gerald Daugherty (renowned for opposing public transportation):
“This is making me real nervous. Either we need to change the heading “mobility financing task force” -- which I thought that thats what we were going to do. I mean I know that there is a lot of these other things that need to be in here. I know that there are people in this community that have a real heart ache about single occupancy vehicles. But something that is irrefutable is that that people continue to use that as their major mode of transportation. I don’t think we need to NOT consider land planning and things that might persuade people to look at something else, but I don’t want to get to June and only to go to CAMPO and tell everybody that you know, what we did is we went off and we spent five or six months of feel good --
you know we got everybody on the same page with trying to get everone to travel a different way in this community -- we’ll still have five or six hundred people who want to come out and chew on us about this. You know the other thing thats irrefutable is its all about money. We just don’t have the money to build what we know is the number one thing that we’ve got to have and that is a comprehensive road system, which by the way is the best thing that you could build to make your public transit work better than it does. And if we divert too much attention away from this -- number one I don’t think we’ve got enough time between now and June...
Watson: Well we don’t ...
Daugherty: We don’t have enough meetings to do the kind of things I think people have been talking about since you’ve been gone, and I’m happy to talk about some of those things, but I’m afraid that is what this thing is about that kind of stuff and that we’re going to be in trouble come June...
Watson: Let me see if I can say it this way. The reason I said we need to deconstruct in order to reconstruct because too often what we do is we say well I’m for this for this, you’re for that, well I’m not for that -- so we immediately divide up and say tolls or no tolls, rail or no rail, roads or no roads, and and I truly believe it ends up being a financing task force but it probably is a little bit bigger than that.
“I probably made the mistake of letting the tail wag the dog a little bit because the whole debate has been a financing tool. The whole debate for 24 months has been a financing tool. And thats all it is is a financing tool. In my opinion a great mistake has been made is that this financing tool has been defined as public policy. And the only public policy.You don’t get to talk about a comprehensive road system. Because you need to talk about the financing tool. You don’t get to talk about land use because you’ve got to talk about a road financing tool. You don’t get to talk about an alternative to cars because you’ve got to talk about a road financing tool. When it gets to be a hold grail, all other debate comes to an end. And thats whats happened.
"What my hope is, is that we don’t TODAY start discussing what we think we want. How do we get what we think we want. whether it be more roads, or whether it be more land use, or whether it be rail. But we recognize that there are certain values that we seek to achieve. I’m not putting these in any order, so when someone wants to attack because they think I’ve got preconceived notions. But if reducing congestion is a value we want to achieve, and having money to achieve that value is a second criteria, then you start working through -- and you create your matrix, you create your decision tree, you create your conceptual framework for analysis in such a way that ANY substanitive tool can be put into it.
"And by the way, I think part of the value IS land use. I think its been -- and I’ll show one of my biases -- I think its been a HUGE mistake that its taken our region until 2006, until 2007 to start saying land use is something we really ought to be considering right because guess what, you need less roads if you can plan your community in a way that people live in -- you need a whole lot less of that maintenence money -- those kind of things. Well thats one of the things that we ought to be thinking about, we ought to put that.... What happens with any financing tool? Does it impact in a way that we see as positive or negative?
"And we start coming up with a matrix that then-- someone wants to put in a new rapid bus line, we say “run it through the matrix”. Somebody wants to put in rail? we say put it through the matrix. Somebody wants a new road, we say put it through the matrix if somebody says how am I going to fund that road, we say put it through the matrix. And we create a process that we just don’t have. We’ve NEVER DONE THAT in this community. Part of it is that we’ve kind of enjoyed the fight.
"And this isn’t about a preconceived idea. You know, you have very strong views, and you have very strong views; thats part of the reason that I put you all on here. But we’re not here about whatever your ultimate goal is. I don’t want to know what your ultimate goal is. But I can predict it within a variation of five percent. What I want is your value judgements, and your processes, so we don’t miss something.
"But if you think you’re on this task force to get toll roads, then please resign. If you think you’re on this task force to assure carpooling or rail, please resign. If you think you’re here to kill rail, quit, because we don’t need you! That we’ve got enough of in this town. What we need are people that are willing to guide us through a process, and put their intelligence and their efforts in that regard. If you have a preconceived idea of how you want this to come out and you’re going to work to get us there, quit. I won’t tell anybody why you quit. But we don’t need you. We’ve got enough of that going on in our community right now. The headline of the week. We cannot afford the headline of the week.
"Pretty long speech for a man that wasn’t here for the last hour or so... Laughter... Our next meeting is Feb. 23...
