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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In the Constitutional Convention the mass transit proponents, led by Common Cause of Texas, have argued first for elimination of the dedicated fund altogether or, as an alternative, for language that would allow some of the money to be used for public education and public transportation systems. The Highway Lobby, as tactically astute as ever, has responded with a proposal of its own: a different constitutional provision that would dedicate one-fourth of the present four per cent state sales tax on motor vehicles solely for mass transportation. This plan would provide about $50 million in state funds (matchable with 80 per cent federal funds), while leaving the half-billion dollar highway fund intact. Both sides have claimed popular support for their positions, and each has produced the results of a poll to prove they have it.
A feeble compromise was adopted by the Convention’s Finance Committee in February. Delegate Bill Sullivant of Gainesville proposed that the dedicated highway fund be preserved without change, except for a proviso that any future increase in the gasoline tax (above 50 per gallon) should not go automatically into the dedicated fund. The Legislature that raised the tax would, in Sullivant’s plan, have the discretion to give the new revenue to the THD or channel it somewhere else. At press time it seemed likely that this proposal would be adopted by the whole Convention. Certainly it seemed the most that the critics of the dedicated fund were likely to get.
The Highway Lobby has thrown itself energetically into this critical battle. The TGRA provided each delegate with an inch-thick book that is a tangible record of their pervasive ethos-building. It contains newspaper editorials, endorsements of the dedicated fund from dozens of chambers of commerce and county commissioners (many of whom simply filled in the blanks of model resolutions supplied by the TGRA and returned them as-is), and a not-so-subtle reminder that if all the members of all the TGRA member organizations are added together, the Association speaks for 280,500 Texans. Governor Briscoe has cooperated by issuing a statement declaring the retention of the dedicated fund “is essential if we are going to continue to have an effective highway system.” The governor, who campaigned on a platform of aiding urban mass transit, then adds:
Mass transit at some time—and in some form—has to be explored. But mass transportation will not reduce the need for highways. Texans are sort of independent ... each wants to go in his own car.
Highway building must go on....
The oil industry lobbyists have been conspicuously silent this year (lines at the filling stations prove that they no longer have their old interest in pushing up the demand for petroleum products). By contrast the truckers and bussers (represented by the Texas Motor Transportation Association) have threatened to oppose the entire new Constitution if the Sullivant proposal is adopted.
Despite all the talk about the virtues of the dedicated fund and the need for mass transit, what is really being fought out in the Constitutional Convention is utterly simple. It is whether the people of Texas are going to have the right to change their transportation priorities in the future, through the legislative process, if they decide to do so. As long as the dedicated fund remains in the Constitution they cannot do so unless a two-thirds majority of both houses of the Legislature lets them. The votes of as few as eleven Senators can block any change forever — regardless of urban needs, the energy shortage, or the wishes of a majority of the voters themselves. As long as the fund remains where it is, there will always be money for highways, and the rest of the public needs will fight it out for what is left. Can a majority of Texans change the state’s priorities? That is what the battle is all about.
Felton West, the Houston Post’s capitol correspondent, put the matter succinctly when he wrote:
Imagine how foolish we’d look today if in 1875 the Constitution’s framers had dedicated a 5 percent tax on the sale of every horse to financing public watering troughs and hitching posts.
But then again, Governor Richard Coke had not told the press:
Texans are sort of independent ... each wants to ride his own horse.
Cloverleaf Without Exits
IS IT ENDLESS THEN, A cloverleaf without exits?
The answer is suggested by the Convention testimony of Commissioner Simons. If the dedicated fund is removed, he told the delegates, the highway system will be “plunged into the heart of politics ... instead of having highway projects based on traffic needs.”
“Needs” is the pivotal word. Still influenced by a brief but lurid episode of corruption that flourished and died in less than a thousand days nearly half a century ago, the Department leaders constantly remind themselves of the dangers of political meddling in highway affairs, meddling that substitutes political favoritism for true highway “needs.” Even though the Department’s reputation is so secure today that it would surely be insulated from legislative logrolling if the dedicated fund were dropped, this fear remains its central organizing Myth, its Homeric legend retold from father to son. In 1925 Troy fell. With his sturdy sailing ship, Aeneas has led his men to Rome.
Singlemindedly intent upon protecting their cherished Department from the indignity of being forced to serve counterfeit political needs, the highway leaders never pause to consider whether their own traditional definition of “needs” is losing its validity. To them, transportation needs and “traffic needs” are one and the same thing. Their history, their training, their manner of selection and promotion, indeed their whole experience has led them to identify “traffic needs” with “highways” absolutely. Men whose mode of thinking is bounded by rubber tires and concrete do not speculate on whether traffic needs can become something different in an urban, energy-short era.
If you imply that these external changes in the Seventies have created a situation in which the Highway Department itself has begun to supply transportation that is not based on “needs,” the leaders find that statement ultimately incomprehensible. Whether building an interstate or building a loop around Taylor, they are simply doing what they and their predecessors have always done. Interpreting the accusation in the light of their experience they can only think you are suggesting they are corrupt, that they build roads as political patronage: for in their injured pride that is the only sort of violation of “needs” they know.
It is not surprising, then, that the Department leaders tend to see the same dangers that the highway builders see—the danger of running out of funds, of not being able to plan ahead. In a real sense the interests of the highway bureaucracy and the highway lobby have become identical. And why should not a commissioner and a lobbyist open a bank together, if there is no longer a point of view to influence “unduly”?
Proposals for mass transit in Texas focus on buses not merely because buses are the only form of public transportation that can be put to work immediately, but also because the idea that transit can be “mass” is an unfamiliar, undigested one. At the very time when lines at the filling stations are demonstrating that transit may have to be “mass,” and substantially so, in the very near future, public transportation is still regarded as no more than a means for moving people around whose poverty, disability, or temporarily empty gas tank prevent them from using a private car. Unquestioned is the assumption that we can rely on the automobile ... forever.
Is there a more sensible way of getting people around than having them propel two tons of steel at eight miles per gallon? Should there be?
Texans may soon be forced to make some hard choices about their transportation policies. At the moment, because of the dedicated fund, those choices are made for them: the Highway Department will go right on building highways until someone tells it to stop or to slow down. They have the money and they define the “needs.”
There is no way short of constitutional amendment for the public to redefine those needs or to force their moderation so that more money can be spent on other things. New funds can of course be created for new needs, be they mass transit or anything else. But the highway money will still be spent. And it is as much “misgovernment” to build things the taxpayers do not need, as it is to fail to build those things they do need. Even if you build them honestly. Even if you build them well. In its studied, proud efforts to avoid making the latter mistake, the Highway Department may now be in danger of making the former.
The reaction of the Department toward suggestions that it be given responsibility for all forms of public transportation, becoming a sort of state Department of Transportation, is a telling commentary on its insularity. All three Commissioners told the Convention that mass transit programs should be handled by some other agency. Commissioner Simons added that putting the two together would “dilute the thrust” of the Highway Department.
Instead of saying, “we are engineering professionals; we are ready to do what the state needs. When you wanted good roads, we built the best in the country. If you want good mass transit, we can build that best too,” the Department has fled from the new responsibility. Through changing times they have remained precisely what the Lobby planned for them to be: a bureaucracy totally committed to roads.
Texans may or may not want a vigorous governmental effort to develop mass transit; different polls yield different results. But if they do, they cannot be optimistic when they see the Highway Department, the Mass Transportation Commission, and the penetrating influence of the Highway Lobby on the selection of the men who set these agencies’ policies. They cannot expect the Texas Good Roads Association—even if renamed “Texans for Better Transportation”—to send forth the word to chambers of commerce and local governments that a new day is at hand. Most important of all, they cannot expect their existing transportation bureaucracy to step back and take an impartial look at other types of transportation.
If Texans want this done, they will have to find a way to circumvent the most immovable bureaucracy and the most irresistible lobby in their state. If the people want an exit, they will have to hire their own bulldozer.
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