Do Not Ask for Whom the Road Tolls

By MARK ANDERSON

While things had been rather quiet in the realm of foreign corporations privatizing freeway lanes and building new tollways with unprecedentedly punitive toll charges and penalties across Texas — largely due to the election of anti-toll Gov. Greg Abbott in 2014 — that period of relative calm gave way to a flurry of toll proposals this year.

The worst specimen by far during the January-May legislative session was Texas House Bill 1951. It came as quite a shock since the 2015 and 2017 sessions were relatively tame.

But the good news is that HB 1951 was defeated in mid-May, thanks to the vigilant citizens who comprise Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF) and other activist groups.

With the bill’s defeat, a monstrous bullet was dodged, at least for now, although other efforts by Spanish-owned Cintra, among other global interests, to engineer toll deals with politicians are making commuting in the greater Dallas area, for example, prohibitively expensive.

HB 1951 was unique, in that “it would have opened the door to public-private partnership toll road deals, two per year, forever,” Terri Hall, a longtime TURF leader who opposes the tolling and privatization of the state’s public highways, told this writer. “There was no expiration date. This would literally have handed the Texas highway system over to global companies.”

The contracts for such deals are often called Comprehensive Development Agreements, she said, adding: “At the end of the day, these [CDAs] are part and parcel of the Trans-Texas Corridor; it’s eminent domain [land-condemnation and acquisition by government for private use] to hand over our public arteries for daily living to foreign entities that couldn’t care less about Texas.”

She continued: “Literally within a day or two of us defeating that bill, the Fort Worth Star Telegram had a major article about the complaints people are having in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, on one of the projects that Cintra gained back when Rick Perry was governor of Texas and [motorists] are literally paying $15 to go five miles. Anytime you give taxation over to a private corporation that we can’t hold accountable, this is what’s going to happen.”

Notably, the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC)—the Texas portion of a scheme by foreign interests to contract with Texas and several other states to build a “NAFTA Super Thoroughfare—was officially removed, in name anyway, from the Texas Transportation Code in 2011. Given TURF’s years-long battle to bottle that globalist genie, that is more good news—except that the corporate interests whose tentacles extend to highway arteries across the nation, including North Carolina, Virginia and into Canada, won’t give up and are greasing pockets and glad-handing to dispossess Americans of their tax-funded freeways.

State Highway 130, a toll loop which goes around Austin, is an adjunct of the original TTC (the “TTC-35” part of the overall corridor) and is the only part of the TTC that got built. But when Cintra lost its part of the SH-130 contract, it started trolling around to establish toll lanes on the I-35 freeway from San Antonio up to Dallas, which is about 273 miles.

“That was the original plan of Perry, to put privatized toll lanes throughout our state on I-35—the main artery people for the movement of people and goods in Texas,” Hall said. “Seventy five percent of Texans live within 30 miles of I-35.”

Via piecemeal arteries like the Chisholm Trail, a new approach to get the TTC built is to mirror the TTC route in a gradual fashion but do so without the controversial TTC name that had alerted people to an apparent scheme to build a North American Union-style highway system and impose a globalist trade grid onto Americans and convert taxation into a private function via heavy tolls.

How heavy? KXAN News of Austin reported last August that area resident Mela Louviere received a toll bill showing she owed $5,750 in administrative fees for only $412.85 in toll usage. “Louviere isn’t alone,” KXAN noted. “This year [2018] more than 2.2 million Texas toll accounts had a bill sent to the [law firm] Perdue Brandon Fielder Collins & Mott, who added nearly $1 billion in fees to drivers’ accounts.”

Others have been told they owe in excess of $20,000. And some drivers have had their cars impounded, meaning that these tolls—where private entities wield government taxation power under 50-year toll road contracts—are even becoming confiscatory.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2019

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