Texas OKs Guarantee For NTTA

DALLAS - The Texas Transportation Commission yesterday approved loan guarantees allowing the North Texas Tollway Authority to build a $1.3 billion turnpike on Dallas' west side, but not everyone was happy about it.

Grady W. Smithey Jr., a City Council member from the suburb of Duncanville and a member of Gov. Rick Perry's study committee on private participation in toll projects, objected to bypassing private developers on the project known as State Highway 161.

"This deal really marks the end of the fiction that we want public-private partnerships," Smithey said. "When I first heard about this, I felt I had been sold down the river. We had an opportunity to get $500 million more into Dallas County."

Smithey is the secretary of the Dallas Regional Mobility Coalition and a former member of the Regional Transportation Council that disburses federal transportation funds in the region. He said he fears that committing public funds to an attractive, profitable project like SH 161 will diminish prospects for funding more challenging projects such as the proposed Trinity River Parkway designed to run between the levees near downtown Dallas.

"If you don't want me to feel that I've been sold down the river, help us find a way to do the Trinity River Parkway," Smithey said.

Ted Houghton, a TTC commissioner from El Paso, said that he had met individually with Dallas officials the previous night and assured them that the commission still backed the controversial Trinity tollway.

"I believe in all honesty that we will get the Trinity Parkway done," he told Smithey at the TTC meeting in Dallas.

Commissioner Ned Holmes added, "I don't want this to be read as walking away from [comprehensive development agreements]."

CDAs allow private developers to bid for projects. But under a new state law, public toll authorities such as the NTTA get right of first refusal on any project awarded by the TTC, the board that supervises the Texas Transportation Commission.

The SH 161 turnpike is the second potential CDA that the NTTA has accepted. The first was the $3.5 billion SH 121 north of Dallas that was originally awarded to Spanish developer Cintra last year, then awarded to the NTTA in reopened, head-to-head bidding.

In the process, the authority has more than tripled its debt burden, seen its credit rating slip one notch as it contemplates six new projects. In order to take on SH 161, the NTTA had to arrange loan guarantees from TxDOT that would effectively insure debt service. The authority also had to plan SH 161 as a standalone project that can not tap other toll-system revenues.

Smithey said that there are no other toll projects on the horizon that private developers would be interested in. "This is the last one that would really work," he said.

Houghton, meanwhile, said he supports raising the gas tax to fund rising maintenance and construction costs. But he said that an increase should be limited to indexing the gas tax rate to inflation. That would allow revenues to grow with the cost of living.

The gas tax rate in Texas has been 20 cents since 1991, and efforts to raise it have proven politically impossible. The federal rate has been 18 cents per gallon since 1994.

Sen. John Carona, R-Dallas, plans to introduce legislation that would tie the gas tax rate to inflation when lawmakers return to the capital in January. Perry, the state's top advocate for private financing of toll roads, said he would not oppose or veto Carona's bill.

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Transportation industry
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