TxDOT Will Use 53% of Taxpayer Stimulus Money For Toll Roads

Take a look at County Commissioner Richard Morrison’s website “As the Court Turns” for the latest news on how TxDOT and Rick Perry plan on using taxpayer-supported Economic Recovery money, also known as “The Stim,” to improve Texas’ transportation system.

“The Texas Transportation Commission (TxDoT), appointed by Gov. Perry, has recommended that the East Region; including Beaumont, Bryan, Houston and Lufkin receive $431,516,770 for transportation projects. From this amount over 53%, or $231,000,000, will be spent on the construction of toll roads. These recommendations ignore the federal law that requires these funds to be spent in economically distressed areas and ignore the will of ordinary Texans who are opposed to our tax dollars being spent on Toll Roads and see these schemes as a type of double taxation.”

Rick Perry is living in a fantasy world. In Rick Perry’s World, Texans live to toss handfuls of coins into toll booth receptacles so they can blissfully drive their SUVs down foreign-owned and maintained (and now, apparently, taxpayer-supported) pay-as-you-go toll roads. In Rick Perry’s World, Texans admire foreign corporations that can wheedle taxpayer money out of the hands of the Obama Administration. In Rick Perry’s World, Texans love them some toll road.

Is this guy nuts?

Didn’t Texans of all colors and stripes outright reject any notion of a Trans Texas Corridor to the effect that it is now DOA? Didn’t Fort Bend County voters roundly reject any notion of a toll road (as in Section C of the Grand Parkway) in the last election when they rejected a Republican toll road cheerleader running for the Commissioners Court?

The only thing that galls me more than this gross misuse of Economic Recovery funds is the fact that we stand to lose this money when the Feds see how Texas state government plans on mishandling and totally mismanaging this money.

Causing me to wonder if it all isn’t on purpose. Does Perry want to purposely lose this money just as he wants to reject the federal funds for unemployment benefits?

No, frankly, I think I am giving Governor Perry far too much credit for analysis. Quite frankly, these days when you look into Rick Perry’s eyes, all you see is the back of his head.