As Texas grows, so do highway needs. Yet road funding is about to hit this dead end

If you thought we fixed the Texas highway funding gap, think again.

If it were the 1830s, America — and many other countries — would be littered with cabin doors marked with a defiant “Gone to Texas.” We add more than 1,000 new Texans every day, and they all bring cars, pickups and SUVs.

But unfortunately, they don’t bring any roads with them.

The Texas population is projected to jump another 50 percent by the time a child born this year graduates from high school — a staggering 14 million more Texans, equal to the current combined populations of the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metro areas, by 2035.

One of the most difficult challenges facing our growing state is maintaining and expanding a highway system in the face of massive population growth, aging roadways and the rapidly expanding number of trucks that fill our highways while keeping the Texas jobs machine spinning.

A decade ago the Texas Transportation Commission assembled the 2030 Committee, a blue-ribbon group charged with providing an independent assessment of the state’s highway mobility needs through 2035. They concluded that the state needed more than $5 billion a year in additional funding just to maintain current traffic conditions at that time.

When the comprehensive Texas Transportation Plan 2040 was prepared in 2014, it also concluded that about $5 billion a year in additional funding would be needed just to keep congestion and road safety from getting worse.

The Legislature went to work on the funding shortfall, and in 2014 and 2015 voters approved Proposition 1 and Proposition 7, two state constitutional amendments that, when in full effect next year, will dedicate about $5.3 billion a year in sales taxes and oil and gas production taxes to highway improvements.

Both these revenue streams have the potential to grow in future years. The Legislature also took a big step in 2015 by ending the practice of diverting about $600 million a year from the State Highway Fund to non-transportation purposes. Still, $5.3 billion in 2020 has far less buying power than the $5 billion gap identified in 2009.

Together, decisions to redirect existing state revenues to highways has gone a long way toward dealing with our shortfall. Utilizing new funding, plus traditional fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees, TxDOT now anticipates it will be able to award $6 to $7 billion a year in highway contracts over the next 10 years.

But that will only be true if lawmakers stay the course. Even with our successes, there is much more to do if we are to meet Texas’ long-term transportation funding needs.

For example, TxDOT’s Fort Worth District alone has nine critical projects that require an additional $4 billion in funding that is simply not available during the next 10 years. As for statewide needs, the list of necessary but unfunded projects in the 10-year planning horizon exceeds $60 billion.

Managed lanes and partial toll financing are tools that have been successful in getting several billion-dollar projects built sooner rather than later in urban areas. They are tools that are only used where supported by local elected officials dealing with paralyzing congestion.

Without a set of robust, predictable, long-term financing sources and tools, hundreds of projects that would get traffic moving quickly will remain in the waiting line for many more years.

When legislators set up Proposition 1 and Proposition 7, they included potential termination dates that will cut off those tools unless extended by lawmakers. Unless lawmakers act, Proposition 1 will expire in just five years – the blink of an eye in executing TxDOT’s complex highway planning and construction duties. The same thing happens to sections of Proposition 7 funding in 2029 and 2032.

In their recent Interim Report, members of the Texas House Transportation Committee recommended to colleagues that all three statutory “sunset” dates be removed.

Highway mobility and safety in Texas will decline dramatically if the Legislature allows these critical transportation revenue sources to expire. The Legislature should vote this year to eliminate or, at a minimum, extend these expiration dates.

The voters of Texas did their job by approving Proposition 1 and Proposition 7 by votes of more than 80 percent. Preserving them should be an easy call for state lawmakers, but we need to remind our legislators that transportation funding, including the ability to use tolled managed lanes, to sustain mobility remains a high priority. Let’s unlock gridlock in Texas.

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