Texas Moon

The Texas House is poised to vote to sell our PUBLIC highways to PRIVATE, foreign corporations in sweetheart deals that will charge the traveling public 75 cents a mile to use our PUBLIC roadways. That’s more than $3,000 a year PER COMMUTER on average. These bills have already passed the Senate so if they pass the House, they’ll go to the Governor who will happily sign them into LAW!

What’s at stake…
So get their phones ringing and keep them ringing! If we don’t KILL these private toll contracts (CDAs), foreign corporations will have the power to control EVERY MILE WE DRIVE for a half century at a time!

So the Legislature hasn’t passed final bills to end gas tax diversions, restrain toll taxes for every new lane of highway, prevent the conversion of FREEways to tollways, properly fund our state highways with the gas tax, finally repeal the Trans Texas Corridor or pass a bill to protect landowners from eminent domain abuse, but they’re rushing to sell-out Texans to benefit private road lobbyists drinking from the public trough!

These private toll contracts are eating up virtually ALL of our available gas taxes and other highway funds to prop-up toll projects that aren’t even toll viable (can’t work without subsidizing them). They tell us the private operators are bringing the money to the table, not taxpayers, so it’s okay to sell us out in sweetheart deals (like non-compete agreements that prohibit ANY new lanes or NEW roads from being built that would “compete” with the private operators toll cash cow as a way to GUARANTEE congestion on free roads). But the FACT is our GAS TAXES and other PUBLIC money are going into these deals, in some cases more public cash than private, but you’ll have to pay a DOUBLE TAX, a toll of 75 cents a MILE to a foreign toll operator, in order to access our PUBLIC roads. This is an ALL-OUT ASSAULT on our freedom to travel!

For more info on just how bad these private toll contracts are for the taxpayers, read more here…

 

URGENT 30 SECOND ACTION ITEM!
So get their phones ringing and keep them ringing! These bills END the private toll moratorium and sell our highways to the highest bidder!

Contact your Texas STATE representative and tell them:

“VOTE NO on SB 404 & SB 17. We don’t want you to sell our public roads to private corporations and charge us toll taxes to get to work!”

Find your STATE Representative here…

Call the Capitol switchboard (512) 463-4630 between 8 AM – 5 PM. To reach your legislators after 5 pm or over the weekend, get your rep’s direct phone numbers here…

You can also email your State Representative by using this formula:

Plug in the name of your STATE Representative to: firstname.lastname@house.state.tx.us

Phone calls are best at this stage of the game…if you can’t get through, keep calling and email.
 

MORE BAD BILLS COMING…
The TxDOT Sunset bill, HB 300, passed the House and will pass the Senate very soon. Both have BAD provisions. Get ready to UNLEASH fury once again when these bills go to conference when 5 senators and 5 state representatives will decide the future of all things transportation. The Senate version has already REMOVED EVERY PUBLIC PROTECTION we got in the House version.  We need to pressure the conference committee called conferees to KEEP the public protections in place and REMOVE the bad provisions from the bill before it goes to the Governor to become law.

The bill that would LEGALIZE the conversion of freeways to tollways, SB 220, is also still looming (and it’s in the senate version of the Sunset bill, HB 300)…stay tuned and be ready!