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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All these influences have given Texas an established Highway Department bureaucracy of transportation professionals who think only roads. Like other bureaucracies, it exhibits the standard tendency to expand its needs, ambitions, and goals (by 1948, only two years after the Good Roads Amendment was passed, Greer told the Legislature that the Department’s needs in the next five years would cost twice as much as the anticipated revenue). What has made the Highway Department different from other state agencies is that it has not been compelled to justify its expenditures against other, non-highway needs. The same things that have helped make it honest and efficient have also made it wealthy, powerful, and inbred. The luxury of its dedicated fund has allowed it the luxury of becoming set in its ways.
These danger signals for the future were fully apparent in 1946, if anyone had stopped to see them. No one did. The Texan’s love affair with his automobile continued, raising motor vehicle registrations from 1.9 million in 1946 to 3.1 million in 1950, 4.9 million in 1960, and 8.5 million in 1972. The Department grew with them.
How the Lobby Works
THE TRANSPORTATION INTERESTS HAVE ALWAYS been a powerful lobby in Texas. Before the highways, there were the railroads. The modern-day Highway Lobby begins but does not end with the Good Roads Association. True, the Association is the closest thing the highway interests have to a common flag; but the various economic groups that support the TGRA also do some lobbying on their own. Two of the most powerful are the Highway-Heavy Contractor branch of the Association of General Contractors, which represents roadbuilders, and the Texas Motor Transportation Association, which vigorously protects the interests of the truck and bus industries. Opinions differ as to which other groups wield the most power. Former Secretary of State Bob Bullock, one of Governor Preston Smith’s closest advisers, insists that no one in the Highway Lobby has more clout than the oil industry. Other observers contend that when hard lobbying is needed, the local chambers of commerce are the most formidable force around. But everyone agrees that the Highway Lobby ultimately draws its strength from its diverse combination of interests.
Those who expect to wait around the Capitol and watch the Highway Lobby flex its muscles every two years are, however, in for a disappointment. The mighty highway lobbyists paradoxically do very little “lobbying,” at least as that word is ordinarily understood: wining, dining, wenching, and twisting arms of legislators. They don’t have to. That is the beauty of the dedicated fund, the glorious legacy of the Good Roads Amendment. So long as Article VIII, Section 7a, of the Texas Constitution remains in the law books, they are safe. And the only way that provision can be taken out is by constitutional amendment: a process that requires a two-thirds majority of both houses of the Legislature even to get on the ballot. It is a lobbyist’s dream. While the other lobbyists—the doctors, the insurance industry, the brewers, the lawyers, the pot smokers, the land developers, and all the rest—are racing around the Capitol halls trying to get their pet bills enacted or defeated step by tedious step, from subcommittee, to committee, to the floor, to the other house, to conference committee, and to the governor’s desk, the highway lobbyists just sit back, act friendly, and smile. All they need is one-third plus one of either house of the Legislature on their side, and the dedicated fund will stay safely beyond all danger. Just fifty-one Representatives, say—or better yet, just eleven of the 31 senators. Keep those eleven little senators, and nobody can tamper with the dedicated fund: not the governor, not a majority of both houses of the legislature aroused to high dudgeon, not the voters, not Saint Christopher himself: NO-body. The ball, as they say, is in the other court. It is a lovely sort of life.
With such an overwhelming strategic advantage, the Highway Lobby can put out the occasional brushfires without ever bothering to take off its white gloves. Even the brushfires are rare. A 1947 attempt by Senator Grover Morris to create a farm-to-market road program by increasing the gasoline tax was successfully squelched by truck, bus, and oil industry lobbyists, who objected to any “diversion” of gasoline tax revenues (even new ones) away from arterial highways. Two years later these same lobbyists, along with the TGRA, supported the Colson-Briscoe Act financing a farm-to-market road program out of general state revenues. The dedicated fund had been preserved inviolate. By 1968 the TGRA had grown as fond of farm roads as any other kind; it buried a bill by Representative Glenn Purcell that would have, in his words, “put the money where the rubber is” by closing out the farm road program.
One of the liveliest brushfires broke out in 1965 when Bob Bullock, then a lobbyist for municipal bus companies, got a bill introduced that would have given them a rebate on the 75 per cent of their motor fuel tax that went to the Highway Department. Bullock reasoned that city buses operate on city streets, not highways. Most of the companies were on the verge of bankruptcy; and his bill would only have cost the Highway Department two or three million dollars, a drop in the bucket for them. A similar bill had been killed on the House floor in 1963, 80-61, and this time the Highway Lobby was ready. Bullock later recalled: “I had a hard time even finding a sponsor. Finally we got it introduced and had a hearing. Lots of mail started coming in from Good Roads members, editorials started popping up in newspapers saying ‘Don’t open the door: everybody will ask for rebates.’ ... It went to subcommittee and, man, it never budged at all. They beat the hell out of me.”
Bullock described the lobby effort as “a very honorable fight. The oil companies lobbied over a drink... . there certainly wasn’t any money changing hands, nothing like that. The Good Roads members contribute to campaigns as individuals, and who was I? I represented a lot of broke bus companies, some of them city owned. Face it: a contributor gets the ear of a legislator quicker than a non-contributor. The Good Roads Association is potent. They’re political, and they do a damn good job.”
Apart from these periodic easy battles the Highway Lobby has very little to do except to continue nourishing the highway ethos that envelops the legislators when they return home to visit with the constituents. Very little, that is, except for one critically-important function: year-in-year-out, they exert decisive pressure on the selection and confirmation of the highway commissioners who set the policies of the THD. If the commissioners waver, the entire highway building superstructure is endangered. So the TGRA and the other components of the highway lobby pay special attention to gubernatorial politics. Selection of these commissioners is the summit of their lobbying. Their aim is to insure that the state’s transportation leadership, like its professionals, thinks only of roads.
A number of exceptional men have served as highway commissioners over the years. Most of them have been chosen in a process dominated by the highway lobby. The TGRA’s candidates are not necessarily men with an economic self-interest in roads—just as the TGRA’s own officers are “laymen.” But they are invariably men having a solid predisposition in favor of the TGRA’s roadbuilding aspirations.
Thirteen men have been appointed Highway Commissioner since the Good Roads Amendment was passed. A few, like Garrett Morris and the current Chairman, Reagan Houston, have not been TGRA candidates. Among the others are the following:
• Fred A. Wemple (1947-1953). President of TGRA before serving as commissioner, 1942-43, and again afterwards, 1955-56.
• Robert J. Potts (1949-1955). President of TGRA, 1947-48.
• C. F. Hawn (1957-1963). Member of TGRA Executive Committee before serving as commissioner; president of TGRA, 1968-70.
• Herbert C. Petry (1955-1973). TGRA director before serving as commissioner.
• J. H. Kultgen (1963-1969). TGRA director, 1947-1962; TGRA president, 1951-55. Automobile dealer since 1936. President of Bird-Kultgen, Inc., Ford dealership in Waco.
• Charles Simons (1971-present). Director of TGRA public relations, 1936-1942; Editor, Texas Parade, 1936-1942; TGRA executive vice-president, 1942-1947. Executive vice-president, Texas Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association, 1947-1971.
The TGRA was unable to say how many of the remaining commissioners had been members of the Association before or after their terms of office. But it is unlikely that they would have protested the appointment of men like DeWitt Greer (1969-present), or Marshall Formby (1953-1959), who ran for governor in 1962 and distributed campaign literature describing himself as “a staunch believer in wide highways” who “helped spend more than a billion dollars for highway maintenance and construction” while serving as commissioner.
During the Constitutional Convention hearings, delegate Jim Vecchio of Dallas brought out the fact that Commissioner Simons had recently applied for a bank charter with, among others, TGRA Board Chairman Russell Perry. Vecchio’s questions implied that there might be a conflict of interest if a Highway Commissioner and a top highway lobbyist went into the banking business together. After Simons heatedly responed that, “I don’t think his being chairman of the Good Roads Association would influence me for five seconds,” the chuckles echoed for days. But the truth of the matter was, Simons was absolutely right. What his critics overlooked was the fact that Simons and Perry already thought exactly alike on every important question about the state’s transportation needs, and had for years: just as virtually every other highway commissioner and Good Roads official has thought alike for two generations. If the commissioners did not already share the Association’s aims, the Association would never have consented to their appointments as commissioners.
The critics mistook an effect for a cause.
Mass Transit in Texas?
THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION FIGHT OVER the dedicated fund has become a battle over the pros and cons of mass transit. Gasoline shortages have suddenly made the issue very real: how do you get to work if there’s no gas for your car? But there is something very one-sided about the now-fashionable assumption around the Capitol that mass transit is needed just because fuel is short. For some people that is reason enough; but for many Texans who don’t own a private car and never will, the problem of finding gasoline to propel one is entirely academic. Texas cities with more than about 50,000 residents are so large, geographically, that people who have no private car find it hard to get where they need to go—to work, to the grocery store, to church. For them there is a transportation shortage, not a fuel shortage.
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