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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Because of its solid financial base, the THD has vast resources that other state agencies do not even dare to dream of. Its Twenty-eighth Biennial Report covering Fiscal 1971 and 1972 itemizes the 17,989 pieces of “major highway equipment,” valued at $19,900,483.50, that the Department owned at the end of August, 1972. In addition to the predictable asphalt distributors, batchers, boilers, core-drills, diggers (posthole), earth-movers, graders, grass-seeding machines, guard rail washing machines (motorized), concrete mixers, power movers (gravely class), nail pickers, paint stripers, pavement breakers, power shovels, road rollers, road rippers, snow plows, mulch spreaders, tractors, trailers, trenchers, trucks, and something called an “unloading machine,” the Report also lists 868 passenger cars of various sizes (642 of which were equipped with two-way radios) and 3506 pickup trucks. This was a sufficient number of cars and pickups to allow approximately one out of every four departmental employees, including secretaries, janitors, and typists, to be on the road alone at the same instant. When employees of an under-equipped agency like the Park Division of Parks and Wildlife hear this sort of thing, they whimper. Most of them have to use their own cars when they travel on state business.
The Highway Department is, in reality, a separate fiefdom, a veritable fourth branch of government. When asked about its relationship to the Legis- lature, highway commissioners and the TGRA like to emphasize the constitutional language that makes the dedicated fund “subject to legislative allocation, appropriation, and direction,” but this subordination is more symbolic than real. The Department has not been forced to justify a highway expenditure to the Legislature since 1946. While the lawmakers can crack down on the THD through the appropriations process if they choose (by requiring it to pay the full cost of various expenses like rights-of-way, curbs, and gutters that are now shared with other governments), the dedicated fund revenue must be used for highway-related purposes. The Legislature is not free to shift it into mental health or mass transit. Even if the legislators got so mad at the Department that they refused to appropriate any of the dedicated fund for anything, the money would simply pile up and await future legislators, two, twenty, or a hundred years hence, who would eventually have to appropriate it for highways. The Highway Department has the upper hand, and the legislators know it.
Legislators are human and they enjoy the power that comes from being able to insist that an agency justify its appropriations. It is a bit galling, then, to be faced with one that is financially independent enough to get away with saying, politely of course, “We appreciate your suggestions but we don’t plan to take them.” This bothers the legislator who feels he ought to have the right to balance the relative needs of, say, a hundred mentally retarded children against the need of the city of Taylor to have a four-lane Loop built around its outskirts. But it also bothers the legislator who just feels he ought to have a say in how the state of Texas spends three quarters of a billion dollars every year. The financial independence of the THD has caused more friction than either side is willing to admit.
This resentment rarely flares out into the open because the average legislator is reluctant to oppose a sacred cow like the Department. One occasion when it did, however, was the planned construction of a ten-story, 20-million-dollar THD headquarters building in front of the State Capitol and across the street from the more modest building erected in 1933. San Antonio Representative Jake Johnson, an old foe of the Department, blasted the proposal in the 1971 legislative session, calling it a “monstrosity” that would make the Governor’s Mansion directly behind it “look like an outhouse.” He asserted that it had been designed to be so tall “in order that DeWitt Greer can look down on the Legislature, rather than the other way around.” Johnson nearly blocked sir the building, but the Legislature eventually settled for suggesting that the Commissioners find some other site. By October, 1971, however, the Department had produced a 25-page, slick-paper pamphlet (at a cost of $1.60 a copy) defending the building’s aesthetics, mentioning that the downtown location was convenient to the offices of the contractors who do business with the Department, and suggesting that if the structure was not built, commercial developers might buy the property and erect something even more offensive there. By March 1972, the Department was contending that even the Legislature could not prevent construction of the building because it would be paid for with dedicated funds over which the Legislature could exercise no control. This struck a nerve. After a personal privilege speech by Representative Frances Farenthold in a June special session, the Legislature ordered the Parks and Wildlife Department to buy the property and convert it into a state park. Governor Smith then vetoed these instructions, leaving the matter more confused than ever. But when the Legislature returned for yet another special session in October, both houses overwhelmingly approved a resolution warning the THD that they were mightily displeased with the whole affair. The lame-duck Governor could not veto a resolution, and the Department, sensing that they had aroused the Legislature’s ire, threw in the towel and agreed to build their headquarters somewhere else.
Significantly, however, the Department has never abandoned its claim that it has the legal right to construct buildings out of its “own” funds without leg- islative approval. And even now, more than a year later. Commissioner Charles Simons gets a wistful, faraway look in his eye when he is asked about the legislative battle. “I really believe that our building, the way we had it planned, would have been a prime asset to that site and to downtown Austin business,” he says. “It was a beautiful building.” The Commissioners have traditionally had few qualms about putting pressure on the Legislature to accede to the Department’s wishes. Most agency heads are rather circumspect about marching out and soliciting public support for their agency’s position in a controversial political issue. Not the highway commissioners. In recent months they have become unabashed lobbyists for preservation of the dedicated highway fund. At a luncheon speech to a business men’s association called “Fort Worth’s Progress, Inc.,” last November, all three commissioners thanked Beeman Fisher, a member of the Constitutional Revision Commission (and of the TGRA) for his successful efforts to preserve the fund in the proposed new constitution. They urged the audience to help persuade the Constitutional Convention to keep it there, and, by extension, to keep roads ahead of mass transit as a state priority.
From top to bottom, the people at the Texas Highway Department have a firm faith in the value of what they are doing. But even as they bask in the sunshine of public admiration for their visible accomplishments, they display the faults of people who talk seriously only to others in their own closed circle. The conflicting ideas expressed before the ^ commissioners at public hearings seldom penetrate the bureaucracy itself. If, as some say, the Department exhibits all the advantages of a government run by engineers, it likewise exhibits all the disadvantages.
Haunted by the possibility that political meddling could ruin the Department—which of course it could—the post-war leadership and Greer in particular hewed an administrative path as far from politics as possible. To administrative positions he promoted men from within the Department strictly, as he saw it, on the basis of merit. The reasoning was simple: as long as our administrators are men who have served in the Department, as long as they are trained men who have proved their competence and not “outsiders” who might be unqualified or who might rock the boat, we are safe from political interference. Greer was determined to protect the Department by quarantining it. He wanted a bureaucracy composed of engineering professionals, and that is what he got.
Except for the convnissioners themselves, who are appointed for six-year terms by the Governor and confirmed by the Senate, virtually all the important administrative positions in the Department are held by engineers who have been promoted through the ranks. “It’s kind of like being a doctor: first you have to be an intern,” says Marc Yancey. “This is one of the essentials of the type of operation we have.” (Starting at the very bottom, however, is not required. Yancey himself left a career in consulting work to join the Department, but he still served six years in the Bridge Division before moving up.) The price for this sort of insulation from politics is bureaucratic inbreeding. Eventually everyone begins to think alike because those who think differently are either not hired, or, if hired, are not promoted to positions of influence. Such a rigid promotional system firmly precludes the possibility that an unorthodox thinker could become Chief Highway Engineer. And only an unorthodox Chief Highway Engineer could choose outsiders with fresh ideas for the middle-echelon administrative positions. It is the kind of unconscious oversight that would come naturally to a trained engineer who began his highway career in 1927 just a few weeks after the Ferguson scandals were ended, as Greer himself did. The formative experiences of this 26-year-old assistant resident engineer in Henderson County were to shape the Department’s policies for nearly half a century.
This inbreeding is profoundly reinforced by the fact that the greatest proportion of THD engineers are graduates of either The University of Texas College of Engineering or the Texas A&M College of Engineering. The dominant influences on Texas civil engineers flow from U.T.’s Highway Research Center and A&M’s Texas Transportation Institute; the graduates’ outlooks are formed there, and, as the Texas Public Interest Research Group (TEXPIRG) has noted, those outlooks are routinely predisposed to favor highway transportation over rail mass transit and other modes. The current semester at Texas A&M’s civil engineering department, for example, includes courses in Highway Engineering; Highway Materials and Pavement Design; Highway Design; Highway Problems Analysis; Structural Design of Rigid Pavements; Roadside Safety Design; and Highway Construction. Only one of the 72 courses deals expressly with urban transportation. Approximately 30 academic civil engineering professors hold joint appointments as research engineers for the Texas Transportation Institute, and they spend, on the average, 60 percent of their time on TTI research projects. Those projects are heavily weighted in favor of highway problems. At the present time the TTI is conducting 52 separate studies for the Texas Highway Department.
Even before the state’s civil engineering graduates have reached the Highway Department, they are intellectually comfortable with its world-view. Perhaps this is because the Highway Department has reached them before they reach it: both the Highway Research Center and the Texas Transportation Institute are partially supported by Highway Department funds.
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