Oct 31
The City of San Marcos will take over pass-through financing agreement from Hays County for improvements and expansion of FM 1626 and FM 110. Hays County Commissioners had approved the pass-through agreement in 2006, but the bond proposal package failed to pass muster with Hays County voters in May 2007.
Estimated cost for both projects is $153 million; under the terms of the agreement the Texas Department of Transportation will reimburse $133 million based on traffic estimates on the new road sections.
Hays County Road improvements move one step closer - Austin Business Journal
Oct 10
A report from the Heritage Foundation Transportation and Smart Growth division reveals that Texas has been the greatest overall loser. On average for the past fifty years, Texas has received on average less than $0.80 per dollar submitted to the highway trust fund.
While recent years have seen a slight improvement over that average, Texas still only received less than $0.84 on the dollar in 2005.
Allocations to the states are based on a formula that attempts to measure need based on qualitative measures, such as miles of road and number of licensed drivers, resulting in the transfer billions of dollars from states in the South and the Midwest to the Northeast, the Mountain West, and Alaska.
Ronald Utt, the report’s author, noted that a “perverse consequence of the donor- donee misallocation is that most states on the losing end are experiencing above-average population growth rates and thus have a greater need to build new roads because of the increasing numbers of motorists. By contrast, winner states are generally experiencing below-average population growth and thus need fewer new roads.
Between 2000 and 2006, the U.S. population grew 6.3 percent, while among donor states, Texas’s population increased by 12.9 percent, South Carolina experienced a 7.7 percent increase, and Georgia’s population increased by 14.4 percent.”