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toll cessation

  • Sparks fly as senators discover numerous toll roads with no debt on them, prompts call to remove tolls
    By Terri Hall
    September 15, 2016

    It’s not often that the very sleepy subject of transportation offers a fiery discussion, but yesterday’s Senate Transportation Committee meeting did not disappoint. In a rare olive branch extended to grassroots anti-toll advocacy groups, Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom and Texans for Toll-free Highways, Chairman Senator Robert Nichols invited them to address the committee about one of its interim studies - a study on the elimination of toll roads.

    Just the title evokes strong emotions on both sides of the issue, and those emotions were in plain view Wednesday. Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) Executive Director James Bass laid out the numbers of how much it would cost to retire tolls on roads built with state funds. Let me say that again, toll roads that were built with state money. That means gasoline taxes and other state funds were used to build the road, but Texas drivers are being charged again, through tolls, to use it — a double tax scheme.
  • Link to article here.

    The most important point to note is that the campaign literature for the initial toll roads in Houston did promise they'd eventually be free to everyone once the debt was paid off. That never happened. Unless the legislature passes our toll cessation bill, it never will. Call your state lawmakers NOW to insist toll comes down at (512) 463-4630.

    No end in sight for HCTRA tolls, because there never was an end
    By, Houston Chronicle,Updated: Aug 17, 2024


    Almost since Harris County started collecting tolls, there has been a belief that someone somewhere promised the tolls would go away once the roads were paid for.

    Well, the roads have long been paid for, at least those first roads, but the tolls are likely never going away. That’s in part because no one ever promised — really promised — they ever would.

    For years there has been talk of what was said at the meetings or on flyers that have rarely, if ever, been shown. While some hold onto the legend as fact, county and toll officials have long called them misunderstandings, if not outright fabrications. There is no record that anyone with the campaign or the county said they were going to retire those bonds and end tolling when voters went to the polls.

    That does not mean someone did not say it. Maybe they did. Maybe they were or were not with the campaign or the county. There is no record of everything everyone said at a community meeting and no record of any unofficial mailers that said it. The claim just is not in any ads printed at the time of the election. It is not in the coverage of either of Houston’s two competing daily newspapers prior to the election. It is not in the campaign materials.

    What a review of the campaign materials and the coverage of it in 1983 will largely get you is a trip down memory lane of when the United States was debating Israel’s right to conduct retaliatory strikes and plans for the Houston-Dallas bullet train.

    Campaign materials, however, do allude to an end of tolls. In 1983 flyers, supporters of the campaign noted that Dallas ended tolls on one of its roads once the bonds were paid and that state law at the time required the lifting of tolls if no bonds were outstanding. 

  • Link to letter here.

    Chairman J. Bruce Bugg, Jr.
    Texas Department of Transportation
    125 East 11TH Street
    Austin, Texas 78701-2483

    August 20, 2024

    Commissioner Bugg:

    As Republican nominees for the Texas House, we are extremely concerned by the action the Texas Transportation Commission took recently to spend over $1.7 billion ($1,700,000,000) of public money to seize control of a toll road (State Highway 288) with absolutely no commitment to end the tolls.

    The Republican Party of Texas’s 2024 Platform states, “We call on the Texas Legislature to abolish existing toll roads.”

    We recognize that in many instances the state cannot abolish existing toll roads without the use of public money, but your decision to do so without a clear commitment to end the tolls is the worst of all worlds for taxpayers and amounts to nothing less than double taxation.

  • Watch the report and analysis by an all-star panel including Holly Hansen with The Texan and Charles Blaine with Texas Scorecard on the SH 288 private toll road buyout by TxDOT on Fox-TV 26 Houston here.