State Sens. Jeff Wentworth and Wendy Davis, and State Rep. Ruth Jones McClendon show in this op-ed how TxDOT is trying to move money that the Lege specifically designated for rail to roads.
Transportation advocates won a hard-fought victory during the 2009 legislative session by securing $182 million in financing for the Texas Railroad Relocation and Improvement Fund, created by the voters through a constitutional amendment passed in 2005 but never funded. Sadly, the state’s transportation bureaucracy at the Texas Department of Transportation is using a budgetary shell game to thwart the will of the Legislature and steal this victory from the public.
“This is wrong,” as Chairman John Carona told the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security Committee last fall. “It smacks of trickery.”
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The $182 million budget rider passed by the Legislature was contingent upon a finding by the state comptroller that there was at least as much money available for roads in the current budget (2010-11) as was available in the last session’s budget (2008-9). TxDOT actually worked with legislators negotiating in good faith to create this formula, and the conditions were clearly and unequivocally met.
Until the Legislature left town, that is.
After the session ended, TxDOT subsequently came up with the disingenuous argument that money allocated to run the new Department of Motor Vehicles was a diversion from TxDOT and should count against certification of the budget rider — ignoring the fact that when the Legislature transferred funding to the DMV it also transferred all of the functions and employees to the new agency: a net zero of budgetary impact.
Even the new chairman of the DMV — the honorable Victor Vandergriff — recognized this accounting trick as a ruse intended to deny rail advocates their victory and so testified to the Senate Transportation Committee, prompting Chairman Carona to say that “the game was rigged” against rail funding.
Remember how KBH tried to make an issue of TxDOT’s mismanagement in the GOP gubernatorial primary? The combination of her general ineptness as a campaigner and Perry’s successful move of the issues to things like secession and who hates government more made that go nowhere. That’s a shame, because this latest move by TxDOT is typical of what the agency has been under Rick Perry, and it deserves more scrutiny than it got during the primary season. I presume the Lege will once again roll up a newspaper and try to swat it on the nose to make it behave, but as with many things in this state, it will ultimately require new leadership to bring about real change.