The Highway Establishment and How it Grew and Grew and Grew
All roads have to go somewhere; but it could be that roads in Texas are going the wrong way.
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Although the Highway Department in the Thirties and Forties was ably run as a professional, rather than a political, operation, the squalid smell of still-recent history reminded many Texans that unless the Department’s planning was insulated from the biennial legislative process, the state might just be living on borrowed time. During the administration of Governor Miriam A. (“Ma”) Ferguson in the mid-Twenties, the Department had struggled through a bleak period of chicanery and political patronage. In a single biennium (1925-26) four different men served as Highway Engineer, the Department’s top executive position. Ten individuals were named to the three posts of Highway Commissioner. All but one of the division engineers lost his job. Finally the Federal Bureau of Public Roads refused to participate in Texas highway projects because of the deteriorating system. The memory of this experience lingered long after the Department was reorganized in 1927. Not surprisingly, it spurred sentiment for the Good Roads Amendment: the Ferguson fiasco, after all, had occurred less than twenty years before 1946, making it closer in time than the passage of the Amendment itself is to us today.
Securing the Highway Department’s finances outside the normal appropriations process was a simple, logical, and therefore attractive panacea to allay these fears. The fact that it would also award virtually permanent protection to a particular special interest’s economic needs was seldom discussed.
Most of the resistance to the Amendment came from other interests who had cast their eyes covetously on the same gasoline tax revenues. County authorities, who wanted to convert one-fourth of the tax into a permanent source of county income, had squelched an attempt to get an earlier version of the Amendment on the Oallot in 1942. The TGRA’s decision to draft their 1946 Amendment to preserve the existing statutory allocation of one-fourth of the gasoline tax to the Available School Fund was a brilliant tactical maneuver that insured the back-up support of the powerful teachers’ lobby, both for passage of the Amendment and preservation of the dedicated fund in future years.
Before 1946, Charles Simons recalls, “you had to continually be fighting off the brushfires” that threatened the Highway Department’s funds. The voters changed all that. From the adoption of the Amendment, the Department was to grow into the largest, most powerful, and in many ways the most competent of state agencies. Nineteen-forty-six was a milestone, and the years since then are the Anno Domini of the Texas Highway Department.
Et in Arcadia Ego: The THD
THE MODERN TEXAS HIGHWAY DEPARTMENT (THD) has far surpassed the most optimistic predictions made for it in 1946. Its reputation is untarnished by any serious hint of scandal. It is among the least secretive of state agencies. It has developed the largest (and many feel the best) system of highways in the United States. Set apart in its own snug—but not little—insular world of engineering excellence, it has an enviable esprit de corps.
The Department’s reputation for honesty is especially remarkable in view of the vast sums of public money at its disposal. Scandals of the sort that brought Spiro Agnew low in Maryland are an all-too-common aspect of highway construction elsewhere. They don’t happen in Texas. The fact that highway funds are constitutionally protected has of course had something to do with this state of affairs, though not as much as the highway lobbyists and the THD would like the public to believe. Keeping highway building out of legislative politics accomplishes very little unless the department that builds the roads keeps its own hands clean. The special strength of the THD is its conscientious administrative tradition—and that is the result not of some nebulous code of loyalties but of the direct personal influence of specific men in specific positions. The man most frequently credited with developing this high standard of honesty is DeWitt Greer, a quintessential Aggie who served as Chief Highway Engineer (in effect, the Department’s executive director) from 1940 through 1967, and is currently one of the three Highway Commissioners. “The lion’s share of the credit goes to Greer,” says Garrett Morris, a Highway Commissioner from 1967 to 1971. “Nobody could ever point an accusing finger at him.” Although an increasing number of critics question Greeks emphasis on highway transportation, he was primarily responsible for selecting generations of middle-level administrators who have kept the Department out of politics for more than 30 years.
The THD’s efficiency and honesty, coupled with Texans’ affinity for highway travel, has to some extent made the Department its own best lobbyist. Legislators are reluctant to place themselves at cross-purposes with an agency that is so popular back home. “It’s really the fact that they do such a good job, and they’re so honest, that’s made them into a sacred cow,” says one former senator. Then too, voters by and large do not object to things they can see as tangible examples of governmental services. “We’re really the only state agency that produces a product,” says Marc Yancey, one of two assistant highway engineers. “You can’t see the welfare product, or even the education product, but you can see ours all over the state. It helps.”
The highway system rapidly expanded in the years following 1946. From approximately 28,000 miles in 1947, it grew to 42,000 in 1950 and 62,000 in 1960. It has now passed the 71,000-mile mark. The Department told the Finance Committee of the Constitutional Convention that 21 entire counties and 1716 communities (including 49 county seats) currently are served by no mode of transportation except the highway system. (Supporters of public transportation, of course, consider this a lamentable situation rather than a source of nride). The 1970 census revealed that in 18 Texas counties, the number of registered motor vehicles exceeded the number of human inhabitants.
Highway building is the principal, but far from the only, responsibility of the THD. The Department provides an incredible array of services—some which directly benefit the public and others which reinforce its image as a virtual state-within-a-state. Charged with the duty of promoting tourism, it publishes a semiannual “Calendar of Events” listing everything from the Sweetwater Rattlesnake Roundup to the Houston Livestock Show, along with brochures about historical trails, maps of every county in three different sizes, a monthly road conditions bulletin (the January issue listed 193 construction sites, with detailed information on the location, extent of construction, projected date of completion, and even the type of road surface onto which traffic was being detoured), and the award-winning guidebook, Texas: Land of Contrast. Its materials have a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness and polish.
The Department’s in-house publications include a slick monthly magazine, Texas Highways, a newsletter called “Highway News,” and several other newsletters published for specific geographical districts. Various branches produce motion pictures (including a 30-minute sound and color feature on highway beautification), answer telephone calls about emergency road conditions, run computerized data retrieval systems that can locate any magazine article about transportation systems, distribute public service announcements to TV stations (a current “spot” tells how to enter a freeway safely), catalog the archaeological discoveries unearthed in the course of roadbuilding, devise new techniques of highway safety (including breakaway road signs and the ingenious empty-barrel collections called Texas Crash Cushions), and print the tons of manuals, reports, and other documents the Department issues each year. The Public Information office distributes more than 1300 press releases annually (on the average, four or five every working day). So great is the Department’s reputation and so deep the lethargy of some weekly newspaper editors that many of these are printed, unchanged, as news stories in small-town papers.
Some idea of the size and complexity of the THD can be gained from a brief glance at its internal structure.
The three commissioners are Reagan Houston (the chairman), DeWitt Greer, and Charles Simons. Houston is a San Antonio lawyer appointed by Governor Dolph Briscoe. Governor Preston Smith had the inspired idea of crowning Greer’s career by appointing the retired chief engineer to a commissioner’s post; it was like picking Winston Churchill to be king of England. Smith also appointed Simons, a balding, witty gentleman who looks like Sibelius mellowed by a touch of Charles Coburn. These men set the Department’s policy, and Chief Highway Engineer B. L. DeBerry carries it out.
DeBerry has separated his giant bureaucracy into two parts and placed an assistant highway engineer over each one. The “operations” side of things is supervised by M. G. Goode, Jr. Its eight sections include Highway Design; Bridges; Maintenance Operations; Secondary Roads; Construction; Right of Way; Materials and Tests; and Planning and Research. Each is directed by an engineer. The administrative side is supervised by Marc Yancey, Jr., a likeable, diplomatic ambassador for the Department who could, in meticulously-chosen language, probably convince the head of a local Sierra Club that a proposed interstate highway through his living room was actually a splendid idea. Yancey’s seven sections include Finance; Motor Vehicles; Travel and Information; Insurance; Equipment & Procurement; Automation; and Personnel.
The day-to-day business of the Department is highly decentralized. Only 400 of its 18,000 employees work in the downtown Austin headquarters. More than 1250 THD buildings are scattered around the state in 25 separate and largely autonomous geographical Districts. Each District is headed by a District Engineer who, in accordance with traditions established by Greer, is expected to handle most of his problems at that level. Interestingly, there is also a “public affairs officer” in each District, a man whose job entails more than answering questions from the public about Highway Department plans. “He keeps apprised of the economic and social conditions in his district,” Yancey relates. “He can tell us about the current political climate and things like that.”
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