Wednesday Roundup: Roads

There's been a lot of news about roads in the last 24 hours or so. Last Friday, state auditors questioned a thing or two about the Trans-Texas Corridor and the state's approach to that project. Representative Lois Kolkhorst has now filed a bill which would kill the TTC altogether, and arguments in favor of the TTC are getting increasingly harder to come by.

"What a great day," said Governor Rick Perry yesterday. He was speaking in reference to the completion of a deal which made Highway 121 the first privately operated toll road in North Texas. The deal is worth $3 billion, and includes a 50 year operations and revenue contract for Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte SA, a Spanish company. The whole trend of privately operated public works freaks me out a little, and learning that driving from Collin County to Denton County is going to cost three dollars doesn't help.

So then, if you're paying attention these days, you know the Texas Department of Transportation is under scrutiny from many sides due to its penchant for pushing deals like the 121 toll road fiasco, and Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst was publicly displeased — I might even go so far as to say vexed — upon learning how much tolls are going to go up during the course of those operations contracts. We can't know what those "astronomical" rates are going to be, though, because it is a secret. TxDOT has a confidentiality agreement. How do things like this even happen?

Back to Governor Perry: do you remember the $100 million border security proposal he talked about during the campaign? And then after the campaign? Well, he's still excited about it, but his office hasn't sent anything over to Appropriations yet and no one has seen evidence of a plan. The committee would rather not cut him a check without some guidelines for how it will be spent, and there's also grumbling that it won't get into the budget if Perry's office doesn't formally request it.

CHIP has been seeing a lot of action in the last few weeks, both in the press and in Austin. However, it is getting some possible rescue help from an unlikely source — a Republican. State Representative John Davis filed some legislation that, while not fixing the program entirely, does rescind many of the cuts implemented in 2003. Dewhurst is giving the bill the proverbial hairy eyeball, but who knows? Maybe this one will get by and something good will happen.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Steve Ogden is on a tear, and he is saying publicly that political pressure against reform is causing problems. The issues of financial mismanagement at Texas Southern University, the aforementioned TxDOT junk, and abuses at the Texas Youth Commission are potentially embarrassing for the state's Republican leadership, and Ogden claims that the tendency is there for problems to be ignored instead of dealt with. This might make the weekly caucus lunch uncomfortable, but these are obviously problems that need to be addressed.

Finally this morning: yesterday was full of news about the stock market, Cheney, and of course, Anna. However, late in the day, Condoleezza Rice actually revealed something that made me feel positive about US foreign policy. They aren't direct talks or negotiations and I expect it will be an occasion bereft of high fives, but Iran and Syria and the US are going to get together and talk about Iraq. Color me surprised.