WHARTON, TX, Wednesday – Continuing her commitment to lead Texas onto new paths of freedom and prosperity, Debra Medina released today a sweeping proposal for addressing the transportation needs of Texas. Governor Perry’s Department of Transportation has been fraught with cronyism, abuse and scandal.
 
Just last week, a concerned and irritated citizen called the Medina Headquarters.  Her small Texas business, American Security Solutions, had bid on a project to install security cameras for the North Texas Toll Authority. TxDOT awarded the project to JAI Inc., a global company that has home offices in Denmark and Japan and too many subsidiaries, aliases and umbrella corporations to follow their multiple rabbit trails. JAI’s “Systems Integrator Partner” is Raytheon and their ties to Gov. Perry smack of the cronyism commonplace in his administration.  Gov. Perry has appointed Raytheon staff to the Aerospace board while the company holds many national and international Dept. of Defense contracts.
 
This is just one more example of what TxDOT has been doing with billions of Texas highway dollars for the past several years. It continues to weave a tangled web of clandestine global corporate pork projects few of which actually address highway maintenance and, just like the foreign-based Cintra contract for the Trans Texas Corridor, the money is going out of the state. Even worse, it is going out of our country! There is no transparency of funding at TxDOT. There is no accountability for project completion at TxDOT. This has to stop!  Texas transportation needs a major overhaul.
 
A Governor Medina Administration will:

• Undertake an immediate statewide audit and reform of TxDOT to insure excellence, transparency and accountability in the use of Texas’ transportation dollars.
• Reframe the transportation debate by looking beyond the biased reports coming from the traffic engineers at TxDOT and TTI which are limited in scope and want to solve congestion with too little concern for costs. Look instead to the research of transportation economists and other students of traffic associated with the top tier universities and think tanks to balance the nuisance (including the problems created by endless construction on the major roadways of our state) of congestion with the high cost of widening and double decking Texas roads.
• Implement steps to improve transportation planning so Texans can participate with more information that is provided today.  This would be information that is not collected today or not provided for the public planning sessions.  For instance...
  • Improve data collection. The private road funding in each Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) should be tracked, tallied and posted so that taxpayers understand that governments are not the only agents in road system expansion;
  • Place a stronger emphasis on incident management, including minimizing irregularities in traffic flow that are the major irritants to road users;
  • Explain to the public that the computer models used by all planning agencies are based on dozens of subjective decisions made by the modelers.  Note that congestion is self-limiting.  Texans, like motorists everywhere, adjust their use of the road system so that most get to work in less than half an hour and average little more than an hour a day on the road. TxDOT does not have a feedback loop in its computer modeling so it misses this important part of driver behavior. Congestion causes road users to adjust how they use the road system. TxDOT and the MPOs overlook this fact;
  • Look further into the research of other countries such as Canada, which has studied the Mobility Report published by TTI and discovered that it exaggerates the cost of congestion which TxDOT uses to justify the Trans Texas Corridor, its multibillion dollar expansion program, and its plan to convert free roads to toll roads.
  • Key to this reform approach will be bringing this information to Texans by changing the planning process at the local level where Texans prepare their periodic regional transportation plans. In particular, upgrade the information offered by the 25 Metropolitan Planning Organizations (http://www.texasmpos.org/. The MPOs coordinate local transportation planning in Texas (and elsewhere in the US).  Incorporate the Congestion is Self Limiting approach to traffic in the MPO planning process as an alternative interpretation of traffic dynamics. Such an approach would include tracking on an annual basis the new roads funded by private firms, which are responsible for most of the new road miles in Texas. MPOs should put that information on their websites and in presentations they make when soliciting input for transportation planning.  
• Retain fuel taxes in Texas and use them for transportation funding as Texas decides.  Texas policy makers can decide how the funds will be spent without having to tailor requests to federal grant application requirements.
• Redirect Texas Enterprise Fund dollars (Perry’s slush fund) to transportation.
• Reject Tolls for Texas state highways.  Tolls on taxpayer funded or bonded roads are an unethical double taxation.
• Prohibit TxDOT’s use of tax dollars for lobbying the public or Congress for transportation projects.
• Champion legislation that will reject federal interference in Texas transportation policy.  Stop interference in transportation by federal agencies such as the EPA and insure that Texas agencies enforce only state law.
• Rescind legislation making any road project that is formerly the Trans Texas Corridor and presently known as the North American Super Corridor null and void and insuring that Texas state roadways will not be owned or operated by multi-national or foreign investors.
• Rein in mission creep at TxDOT, which seems intent on expanding its empire. TxDOT has gone far beyond road building and ventured into every area of transportation in which the federal government has grant money to offer.  This distracts from core mission and contributes to the growth of government.  TxDOT is too big for its britches.

Terri Hall of TURF, an organization dedicated to truth in Texas transportation, stated, “Rick Perry's Transportation Commission has agreed to pledge the State's credit (basically untold billions in our gas tax revenues) for two toll projects in north Texas (at the behest of the North Texas Toll Authority, a regional toll way authority, whose credit is so in the toilet it can't finance these deals without the State's backing).”  
 
This is the same tolling authority that accepted the above bid from JAI Inc of Denmark and Japan. They are planning to build on state credit, on yours and mine, on Texas’ credit, raising the debt in Texas which has nearly tripled under Governor Perry and which is already bumping up against our constitutional debt limit ceiling.
 
“With a restoration of private property rights, state sovereignty and accountability and transparency in government, Texas will pave the way for new transportation solutions and enjoy again a well maintained and sustainable road infrastructure capable of supporting a diverse and prosperous economy,” said Debra Medina, Republican candidate for Governor.