It's not that I'm not interested. I just don't know the background of how these projects are done. Have roads always been paid for in the budgets historically, or through bonds?
This might be a good question for the groups that gathered to oppose the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC).
OffTheKuff had a good post on TXDOT's budget shell game in general. It's obvious that the Dept. is hiding some problems internally.
Off The Kuff 5/9/10TxDOT’s shell gameState 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."
Off The Kuff 5/28/10The TxDOT auditMay 28th, 2010
by Charles Kuffner.
I’m sure you will be surprised to learn that TxDOT has a lot of issues.
The Texas Department of Transportation should significantly alter its leadership structure, reshuffle its executive ranks and reduce the role engineers play in leading the sprawling agency.
That’s according to a new — and at 628 pages, exhaustive — audit of its management and structure by the accounting firm Grant Thornton. The audit, available in full
here, was released Wednesday by the department after the accounting firm revealed its findings.
I am still working through the details, and there are a lot of them. But key recommendations from the audit focus strongly on the nature of the leadership of the department, which has been under fire in Austin and elsewhere for years, often because of resentment by lawmakers and others that see it as a tool of Gov. Rick Perry’s campaign to add toll roads throughout Texas.
:kick: