Newsroom

Doh! Watson talks tough to tollway builders

Monday, April 23, 2007
by Ben Wear
Austin American-Statesman

If the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association was expecting puffery when they asked state Sen. Kirk Watson to speak Sunday, well, they were badly misinformed. Watson, while supportive of building some toll roads, gave the 200 or so toll road folks from all over the country who were present in the Hyatt ballroom something of a woodshedding. And he threw in some pointed shots at previous legislators and Texas Department of Transportation officials.Some excerpts from Watson’s speech as written, which I heard live. He departed from this text very little.“Road building has always had its share of controversy simply because roads go through places that didn’t have roads before. But, right now — at least in Texas — it’s hard to find a corner of this state that hasn’t been singed.“You guys should pay attention to this. With all due respect, let me say it this way — you should not look simply as engineers, where you think you can add up our needs and your tools and come up with an easy answer. If there was ever a time when the old phrase, ‘It looked good on paper’ could get you in trouble and lead to something much more than a paper cut, it’s now.“You have all chosen, and created, a powerful industry. You change real things for real people with what you do and what you build. You have power to transform. You also have enormous power to disrupt …“We, at least in Texas, face a funding crisis. Our largest source of funding for roads and transportation infrastructure, the gas tax, has been frozen for 16 years — think about that, 16 years — by what can only be considered a knee-jerk anti-tax attitude.“At the same time, that gas tax has been siphoned off to pay for other things the state needed but elected officials refused to pay for. Elected and appointed officials were essentially dishonest about the needs of a rapidly growing state, and that dishonesty has left the rest of us in a hole they dug. A hole that requires tens of billions of dollars to fill. That’s deep.“And some of the folks who still have the dirt of that hole under their fingernails are shocked to see their ‘private development agreement’ and other new funding schemes don’t have credibility… “All of our region — really, a lot of the state — had become stuck with a ‘Don’t Ask, Just Tell’ toll road policy that lacked the transparency and accountability it needed.“Somehow, lots of people were surprised that this was controversial. All of those factors have contributed to a fundamental loss of trust between the people who build our roads and the people who drive on them …“So, in closing, please consider the role you can play in assuring that all of our new tools will turn roads and other projects into true assets, not simply assets defined by what they cost, how many cars they hold, or how much money they make.“As much as any single industry, you are responsible for the face of a community. You are NOT just about building infrastructure. You are also about building places. Please take that responsibility seriously.”