April 1974
The Highway Establishment and How it Grew and Grew and Grew
EVERYTHING HAPPENED AT ONCE. TEXANS woke up to discover service stations running out of gasoline all over town. Highway travel was not the quick, easy bet it had been last year. At 55 miles an hour, motorists had the feeling that some giant hand had lifted Dallas and Houston and deposited them a good hundred miles farther apart.
In the midst of it all was Texas, oil-rich Texas, realizing it was an urban state—79.7 per cent urban, said the census-takers last time around—with three of the ten biggest cities in the country. An urban state, with some distinctly urban problems—like how to get to work and back, how to get to the store, how to get to school, if the family cars couldn't be counted on to supply cheap transportation as they always had. Not that they couldn't: just that someday soon they might not. That was the nagging worry.
In 1974 Texans began to realize that all that advice about public transportation might be more than just doomsday talk from pointy-headed East Coast zealots.
They hadn't been happy, by and large, when congressmen from the urban Northeast successfully "busted" the Federal Highway Trust Fund last year, allowing a portion of federal highway funds to be spent for mass transit systems in the cities. The Southwestern life style depended on the automobile, they told themselves, and roads are God's way of getting around. Texas was lucky enough to have a first-rate Highway Department—honest, hardworking, smart, and capable of building top-notch highways from a little ol' nickel-a-gallon gasoline tax that was the lowest in the country. Who was worried if all the eggs were in one basket? Texas was lucky enough not to need more than one basket.
They forgot the Southwestern life-style depended on gasoline too—cheap gasoline, plenty of gasoline, all - night - green - stamps - service - with - a - smile - win - the - contest - pennants - flapping - in - the - wind - free - glasses - 32 - cent gasoline.
It all happened at once, and the next thing Texans saw was their legislators all decked out as delegates to a Constitutional Convention, rewriting the basic document that a bunch of independent steel-eyed farmers had put together back in 1875 when the state was eight per cent urban. Questions about mass transit, highways, and basic transportation policy were suddenly being asked in earnest by those delegates (some of them, anyway) because they had to decide whether to preserve the constitutional provision that guaranteed the Highway Department would have first shot at the money it needed to keep on building roads.
More than any other part of the country, Texas in the spring of 1974 was the place where public officials were forced to stand up and debate about the kind of transportation policy their citizens should have—to argue whether highways ought to have first priority, whether mass transit was feasible, whether the Legislature's hands should be tied by the new document.
As a result the Constitutional Convention has been a grand show. Other states fumed, fussed, and speculated about the problem of getting around. Texans actually had to make some decisions about how they were going to cope with this new topsy-turvy world. At the Big Top in Austin, the Highway Lobby is out in full force, and the spotlight shines on one of the most remark able bureaucracies in state government.
A Well That Won't Run Dry
THE BATTLEGROUND IS THE SO-CALLED "dedicated highway fund," a state constitutional provision that has profoundly shaped transportation planning in Texas since its adoption in 1946. It allocates, or "dedicates," most of the money the state collects from motor vehicle registration fees and taxes on gasoline, diesel fuel, and lubricants "used to propel motor vehicles over public roadways" into a special fund that must be used only for acquiring rights of way and constructing, policing, and maintaining public roadways. The bulk of it goes to the Highway Department. A small portion (less than ten per cent) goes to the Department of Public Safety; the counties keep a slice of the registration fees, according to a 1929 formula that strongly favors rural counties over urban ones; and one-fourth of the motor fuel taxes are diverted to the public schools.
In a state with nine million gas-gulping cars, trucks, buses, and other motor vehicles, such a scheme provides the Highway Department with a massive chunk of guaranteed tax revenues. None of the other state agencies, from the Air Control Board to the Water Well Drillers Board, enjoys this special luxury. They must each shove and fight every two years for legislative appropriations to run their shop. Only the Highway Department, the public schools, The University of Texas, and Texas A&M University have the benefits of constitutionally-dedicated revenue. The money is there; they know from past experience just about how much of it there will be; and the Legislature merely performs a polite ceremonial gavotte by awarding them biennially what is already theirs.
How massive is this revenue chunk? In Fiscal 1973, the Department drew $454,380,000 from the dedicated fund. That was 64 per cent of its total income; most of the rest, 31 percent, came from the Federal Highway Administration as matching funds. By way of comparison, the total 1973 appropriation for the Air Control Board was $399 thousand, for the Department of Health $44.9 million, for Parks and Wildlife $39.3 million, and for the Water Quality Board $5.4 million.
By the parsimonious standards of the state budget, Texas has made a lavish commitment to one particular form of transportation. The reason can be traced to the confluence of several currents: a powerful and effective lobby, a bureaucracy that in many ways exhibits the best qualities that government has to offer, and not least the postwar infatuation of Texans themselves with the private automobile—a passion for individual mobility that scarred most forms of "public transportation" with a vulgar social stigma. Each of these currents is a matter of history.
The TGRA: Well-Drillers Extraordinaire
THE ADOPTION OF THE "GOOD Roads Amendment" by a vote of 231,834 to 58,555 in the general election of 1946 was the climax of parallel and at times consolidated efforts by two different groups. The first of these included business interests having a direct economic stake in expanded, large-scale highway construction. The second included public-spirited citizens who saw in good roads (and the general economic development they might produce) the magic key to the booming, bustling Texas they dreamed of creating. Twenty-eight years later the Amendment remains intact, unaffected by all efforts to divert its dedicated funds to other purposes, and the dual motives that created it are still apparent in the membership rolls of the powerful lobby that midwifed its adoption: the Texas Good Roads Association. The TGRA brought these two groups together in the Thirties and keeps them together today. It is a marvel of symbiosis and stratagem: perhaps the most fascinating lobby in Texas politics.
The combination of "economic" interests and "civic" interests lies at the heart of the TGRA's lasting effectiveness. It has always drawn the bulk of its financial backing from industries that want a transportation system dependent on the use of highways and the construction of more and more of them: the oil companies; petroleum distributors; cement, asphalt, and tire dealers; automobile dealers; bus companies; truckers; and of course the highway contractors themselves. (Highway building is the only industry in Texas that is 100 percent dependent on government money). Subcontractors also play an important role in highway lobby movements, as do such diverse groups as engineering firms that specialize in roads, and land speculators and developers. They are united by a common desire to preserve, perfect, and expand the highway transportation system. There is no doubt that they have been the muscle behind the TGRA since its inception. In a surprisingly candid article in Texas Parade, the Association's Director of Public Relations and longtime President Weldon Hart described its creation 42 years ago:
The Texas Highway Chapter of Associated General Contractors took the lead in getting a committee organized, representing the whole highway industry. [Tyree] Bell represented AGC, Ben Warden the cement industry, Lou Kemp the asphalt industry, Datus Proper the rock asphalt interests, and so on. One of the important moves was to find a president.. . . and the TGRA was in business.
Significantly, the first president was a respected civic leader with no personal ties to the highway industry. His name was William Ogburn Huggins, and he was the editor of the Houston Chronicle. His selection symbolized the intention of the TGRA's founders to give their organization the image of a dis interested civic club supporting highways because the state needed them, rather than the image of an economically self-interested industry pleading its case. According to founder Bell, Judge Huggins carried this shrewd decision a step farther by insisting that "for public acceptance, . . . the officers . . . should come from the public generally and not include anyone in the highway industry." His rule remains in force today: all of the officers are, in the TGRA's words, "laymen."
More impressive even than the "laymen" officers, however, are the "laymen" members. Among the Association's 2335 members are 54 local chambers of commerce, 46 cities and IBS counties (some of which pay their annual dues with public funds),* and numerous individuals who are prominent in the social and political affairs of their communities. These are the opinion makers. They are crucial.
Some of them, of course, represent highway-oriented economic interests wearing another hat. Many of the local chamber of commerce officers, for example, have a personal economic interest in some aspect of road-building. Others may have a different sort of self-serving interest: Very few county commissioners have ever been hurt by having a road built in their precincts, and there are still a few who stay in office by tipping off their friends about the paths of new rights-of-way. But most of the laymen are exactly what they seem: well-respected, public-spirited citizens who honestly believe that the welfare of the state depends on a good network of highways built by a Highway Department unblemished by political chicanery. They are not money-seekers, not crackpots; they are the bedrock Establishment of Texas. To an impressive extent, TGRA commands their loyalties. These laymen are indispensable to TGRA's purposes. Without them the Association is naked, a straightforward phalanx of powerful economic interests. With them, it is something grander than a lobby: it is a movement, a personification of the Texas automobile-highway-mobility ethos. No other lobby in the state has so successfully camouflaged its basic economic motives.
Impressively framed on a reception-room wall in its Austin headquarters is a striking, hand-lettered gubernatorial proclamation issued by John Connally in honor of Highway Week, 1964. The visitor reads:
