March 29 Transcript

Texas Department of Transportation Commission Meeting

STAFF:

MR. WILLIAMSON: Good morning. It is 9:02 a.m. and I would like to call the March 2007 meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission to order. It is a pleasure to have each and every one of you here with us today.

Please note for the record that public notice of this meeting, containing all items on the agenda, was filed with the Office of Secretary of State at 4:01 p.m. on March 21, 2007.

Before we begin today's meeting, please join with me in taking a moment to place your pager, cell phone, PDA, Dewberry and whatever else you carry on the silent or vibrate mode so as not to interrupt those who are speaking at the time your electronic device erupts. Thank you very much.

As is our custom, we will open with comments from the members, and this morning we'll start with Commissioner Fred Underwood and work our way back to the center. Fred.

MR. UNDERWOOD: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would just like our audience to know that today, with some of the things that we're going to be covering, we really take it very serious with some of the issues that we're going to have to address.

I'd also like to thank the TxDOT staff for this past week for the hard work they've done. You in the audience, while you were probably at home late in the evening watching the evening news, they were up here working and whatnot, when you got up the following morning, they were back at work before you were at work or whatnot. And I just want to thank them for all the hard work they've done this past week getting information together for us.

Mr. Chairman.

MR. HOLMES: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, everyone. We look forward to hearing your comments on some of the rescission issues and your input has been helpful and we appreciate that.

We also are looking forward to hearing some of the discussion on this panel. It will be the first one that I've attended, and so I'm looking forward to it.

Thank you.

MR. HOUGHTON: Good morning to my friends from the Fort Worth-Dallas region. Is that the way I'm supposed to say it, Ric?

(General laughter and applause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I think Mayor Cluck would prefer Arlington-Fort Worth-Dallas.

MR. HOUGHTON: I was teed up to say that. From the Metroplex area I've got some great friends, made great friends over the last three years in the region, and if I named individual names, I'd leave somebody out, but they know who they are. And I've enjoyed working with them and I look forward to a continued relationship.

And I echo the remarks of my fellow commissioners, Ned and Fred, as far as the staff is concerned, and looking forward to being down here in front and removing this barrier between us.

So good morning again.

MS. ANDRADE: Good morning and welcome to all. Boy, we have a full house; this looks great from up here.

I'd also like to echo comments from Ted, Fred and Ned.

(General laughter.)

MS. ANDRADE: I welcome you all. Thank you so much for helping us prepare this great state of ours with our transportation needs, and I look forward to taking care of business today.

Thank you all.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Thank you, members.

I associate myself with the remarks of my fellow commissioners and I welcome everyone here. We appreciate you taking the time out of your valuable day to join with us in our never-ending question to solve the transportation challenges that are before us.

We're particularly happy to have such a broad-based delegation from the North Texas region of the state, a region which I call home and of which I'm quite proud for its commitment to solving problems on a regional basis. Even though we occasionally disagree individually, at the end of the day -- or as might be more appropriate, at the end of this session, we will all join hands and walk together into the future solving our common problems, I'm convinced of that.

Please take note that if you wish to address the commission today, we ask that you complete one of two speaker's cards. If you intend to comment on an agenda item, we ask that you fill out a yellow card, similar to what's in my right hand. You can find this card to your left in the lobby outside.

If you wish to comment on a non-agenda item at the end of the session, we'd wish that you fill out a blue card, similar to the card in my right hand, and you can find it, again, to your left in the lobby on the table.

Whether it's an agenda item or not, to the extent that you can, we ask that you limit your comments to three minutes in order to permit everyone the opportunity to speak, unless you're a sitting member of the Texas Legislature, in which case we invite you to take as long as necessary to convey your message.

We have a busy day and we have members who need to leave before the sun goes down, so we're going to try to move it along as businesslike as possible, taking light of our visitors from North Texas whom we wish to have plenty of time to express their viewpoint about the particular challenges that face North Texas.

You may have found in your chair a card which announces the Second Annual Texas Transportation Forum which will be held in Austin from July 18 through July 20. There's a website address listed where you can register, and as the date draws closer, you'll be able to get more information about the speakers and the program.

There are monumental challenges facing us in the transportation world, and we are convinced that we can all meet these challenges together if we work together to solve the problem today and not tomorrow. If you're interested in hearing about those challenges and the solutions available to us, we encourage you to register and attend the Transportation Forum.

Members, the first item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes of the February commission meeting and the minutes from last week's special meeting held on March 22. The draft of the meeting minutes are in your briefing materials and you've had time to review. Do I have a motion?

MR. UNDERWOOD: I make the motion.

MR. HOUGHTON: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries. Thank you, members. Mike.

MR. BEHRENS: We'll go to agenda item number 2 where we're recommending some new members to be appointed to the Trans-Texas Corridor Advisory Committee, and Phil, will you make that presentation of the minute order?

MR. RUSSELL: Good morning, commissioners, Mike and Roger.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Good morning.

MR. RUSSELL: For the record, I'm Phillip Russell, director of the Turnpike Division.

Commissioners, as you remember, approximately two years ago you created the Trans-Texas Corridor Advisory Committee with a purpose of providing advice and recommendations to us as we develop the corridor. Originally you appointed 23 members to that committee, and over the past year or so, four members have stepped down.

The minute order before you, if you approve it, would appoint four new members to the advisory committee. Those four members are: Veronica Callahan from El Paso, Jim Edmonds from Houston, John Hamilton from Lubbock, and Charles Thomas from Carthage.

Staff would recommend approval of this minute order.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members, you've heard the staff's explanation and recommendation on this matter. Do you have questions or comments? What's your pleasure?

MR. HOUGHTON: So moved.

MR. HOLMES: Second.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have a motion and a second. All those in favor of the motion will signify by saying aye.

(A chorus of ayes.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: All opposed, no.

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Motion carries. Thank you, members. Thank you, Phil.

MR. RUSSELL: Thank you, commissioners.

MR. BEHRENS: We'll now go to agenda item number 3 which will be our regional report from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we call them, the Partners in Mobility. And I think, Chairman, you want those people who wish to speak to join us at the table in the front.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Last year we began what we hope will be a continuing tradition and one which will extend to all nine of our metro areas as time goes on. This is a great state, it is a diverse state, there are nine metropolitan transportation regions in our state which have unique challenges that require unique solutions, unlike our urban areas, cities such as Waco and San Angelo, and unlike our rural areas, cities such as Floresville.

We've learned -- or perhaps maybe I should say I've learned over six years that the metropolitan areas' problems will not be solved in any way other than a cooperative way, and to signify and solidify our commitment to working at the same table and not across a dais, we have chosen to begin these meetings from last year sitting at the same table.

And so, Michael, if you'll bring yourself, Cynthia -- always good to see Cynthia -- Linda, Oscar, Paul, Charles, Jeff -- does that get it, Michael?

MR. MORRIS: Yes, that's it.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And members.

(All moved to table.)

MR. MORRIS: Mr. Chairman, members of the commission. For the record, my name is Michael Morris, director of transportation at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and all of our presenters, before they speak, will identify their names for the record to help keep the minutes up, and I'll friendly remind them if they start in and forget to introduce themselves.

This is the thirteenth time the Partners in Mobility have come to the commission. We have a memento for you, a pin. We are going to start a tradition where every year we identify on the pin what the focus for the particular year would be. In this particular year it's innovative finance and $5 billion. We held 41 public meetings last year, it could have easily been a bottom-up approach or public involvement. Every year we'll bring a theme to you as we move forward.

But this pin is a symbol, I think, for the dedication that you have had for commissioners over the last year. We very much thank all of your hard work. We'd like to thank your aides, your administrative assistants that have worked hard over the last year, all of the headquarters staff that have participated in this partnership, the division staffs, the district staffs, and all the people behind me today.

This has been a very busy, a very challenging year, but a very fulfilling year, and this pin is a symbol of that appreciation. So if you're here today with the Partners in Mobility, or think the Partners in Mobility is a nice group, or have heard a Partners in Mobility presentation previously, would you please stand up today.

(Applause.)

MR. MORRIS: You are requesting a new format. The format we're seeing here today, we experimented with you, I think, a year ago. This is a partnership before you with regard to metropolitan planning organizations and transportation providers working together.

You want to focus on getting the job done, you're trying to eliminate the political elements of presentations before you and actually develop relationships with people that are building projects, and this new format we think you will use for lots more activities across the state.

There's lots of accountability that is necessary with regard to what we do. Mobility is serious, Commissioner, as you indicated in your business introduction; air quality is serious business; we take our responsibilities very seriously and we very much enjoy the partnership we have with you.

The region felt it important to document in a state of the region report the successes that the region has developed over the last year. I feel it's a very compelling story about these accomplishments. This report was written both by MPO staff as well as directly by the transportation providers themselves.

We welcome you to interrupt us at any time -- this is a conversation -- if something needs clarification, or you can ask questions at the end, or both. We purposely have not brought PowerPoint graphics because I think this is a ledger of our accomplishments over the year that we hope will be used for lots of events as we bring forward.

Let me introduce our panel. The chair of the Regional Transportation Council is Commissioner White. She's a commissioner from Denton County, and she will go first.

Council Member Linda Koop is with the Dallas City Council. She is the secretary of the Regional Transportation Council, and she chairs the Transportation Committee in the city of Dallas.

Mayor Trevino is the vice chair of the Regional Transportation Council. He's the mayor of North Richland Hills and he's the president of the North Central Texas Council of Governments Executive Board.

Paul Wageman is chair of the North Texas Tollway Authority, our partner in building toll roads within the region.

Charles Emery is chair of the Denton County Transportation Authority, representing the transit authorities within the region. He's a member of the Regional Transportation Council.

Mr. Kolmer, chair of the Dallas Airport Board, couldn't be with us today because a family illness. Jeff Fegan, the executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, is here today to talk about our seamless aviation elements.

With that, Mr. Chairman, we turn it over to the chair of the Regional Transportation Council, Commissioner White, to begin our presentation.

MS. WHITE: Thank you. We appreciate being here and we appreciate this format. We are actually very excited to be here. We are proud of our region and the solutions that have come with and worked together hand in hand, and that is what the story before you is going to unfold here in the next hour.

I'm going to start off talking just about the transportation partners. Of course, you guys are probably aware of that, but again, I can't say how proud I am of all of them, the RTC, TxDOT with the two regions, the NTTA, the transit organizations, DART, The T and the DCTA, as well as the airports in the region.

I want to just say a little bit about the RTC. They have done a lot of work in this past year in response to some legislation that has occurred, and everyone on the RTC takes their job very seriously.

As you know, they're all local elected officials, they're on the ground, they're in the community, they're on boards of United Way and Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity, involved in Chambers, involved in business, and they are taking the time to tackle these really difficult issues.

They're complex, as you well know, and they're challenging, and they're very important when you look 50 years into the future which is, of course, what the RTC does. So they've done a great job over the last year and a half, two years as they've been tackling some of these new paradigm shifts in funding, and as the pin says, Innovative Funding.

Again, I really want to emphasize the fact that you have a lot of local elected officials that are on the ground running and they're working with these other entities to come up with solutions to the challenges that we face in the region.

And we're all working towards the common goal, and it's the goals that you have stated, and we're going to go into that in detail, but we all want to decrease congestion -- of course, we sit in it day-in and day-out -- we all want to enhance our economic opportunity, we all want to decrease our air pollution, and increase safety and increase our assets.

You look at the growth in the region, of course, that's not a surprise to anybody. The Dallas-Fort Worth -- or Fort Worth-Dallas -- area is adding a million new residents every seven years. That's a lot of growth. I get it all the time, constituents will call and they're saying -- because they're sitting in traffic, they're on the ground in the cars taking an hour or two hours to get ten miles, and I get these calls all the time and they're like, Well, why isn't anybody doing anything?

And I take this opportunity and I know all the elected officials around the area take the opportunity to try to educate these folks and let them know what goes into building a road, and all the different things, the air quality issues that are involved, the sustainable development programs that the region has initiated to try to help address these things. But they're still on the ground sitting in that traffic.

Of course, Dallas-Fort Worth is the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country, 28th largest economy in the world which is pretty astounding when you think about it. Again, I think one of the shifts that the COG has done and the RTC has done is really focused on sustainable development, taking a holistic approach, looking at a lot of different solutions, not just more pavement but how can we keep folks living and working in the same area, and in that being they have funded $80 million in sustainable development programs. So I think the trend then is there for these major developments towards pedestrian and transit oriented projects.

Again, I'm really proud of Denton County having the foresight to work with the legislators to create the DCTA and now, of course, they're working in concert with the other transit organizations in the region for seamless transportation.

So our region is really doing a lot and this is just the introduction, these other folks are going to get into some detail, but again, I really want to pat everybody on the back in the region, all the transportation partners, as well as the TTC. I think we're all working in concert for some common goals that are going to impact our children's children.

Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members, anything?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: I just have one question. What could we do or what could our districts do to be better partners? Now, I don't ask that question about individual disagreements that we might have, but generally speaking, are we designed to be the kind of partners we need to be, is there something different in your mind you've observed?

MS. WHITE: Well, from my perspective, I think in our region they do a good job. I think there are some institutional structures there that maybe hinder the process a little bit, but that's nothing that they have control of, and quite frankly, sometimes it's nothing the state has control of, a lot of environmental things, a lot of processes that each project has to go through to come to fruition.

So I mean, in my mind, I think the biggest obstacle are these institutional things that happen within the agency, but it has to happen that way. I don't know if that answers your question.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, it does. It's never probably a comfortable environment with 5,000 people looking to say, Well, yes, you need to change this. But it occurs to me that there's been so much focus from our standpoint of solving some of the problems that we have to stop and say are we organized really to do it the best way to support a regional approach.

We say how important it is to us to plan regionally and execute locally, but I don't know that we always say to Paul how can we become better regional partners. Paul and I had dinner about this about a year ago.

And if there's any suggestions you have at the end of six years of building towards this, I would hope everybody would feel kind of comfortable saying, Well, yes, Ric, you need to do this; if you're serious, you need to change this. I think we're all kind of open to doing that. The challenge is too intense to not put every conceivable alteration on the table and consider it. That's all.

Please continue.

MS. KOOP: I'm Linda Koop from the City of Dallas, and my part of the presentation are performance measures, and as Chairman White just said, our Regional Transportation Council tries to mirror the performance measures that the Transportation Commission uses as well, and I'm going to go into a little bit of the detail about that.

There's five performance measures, and of course, probably the most important one is decreasing congestion, and on page 4 of your handout it has a little picture that really depicts it. And here's our current condition with the red being congested areas, and this is what it would be if we didn't use the tools that the legislature and that you have given us. It actually showed up better when we were on a screen; it's a little bit more dramatic if you see it on a screen.

The final panel here shows that using the tools that the legislature and that you have given us, we can decrease our congestion in 2025 from what we thought it may have been, or what we knew that it would be if we did not use the proper tools.

The reason that that's so important is we have to get people moving on the highways, we have to get people moving through the Metroplex, or we will be in complete gridlock. And if you come to the Metroplex area, you will notice that in certain parts of the Metroplex, especially where these red areas are, you will be sitting in traffic, and the longer we sit in traffic, the worse the air quality is and the less productive we are. So we're very serious about that, we say that's our number one goal.

And when Michael comes to us and talks to us about a new mobility plan, before we start putting lines on the map, we sit down and we think about these things. He shows us where the congestion is and how we can relieve congestion and he shows us these performance measures, and we go through a process and it takes us about a year to come up with a new mobility plan.

And it starts much before that too, it even starts in the subcommittees, filtering up to the top. So it's a pretty organized structure that we use in the RTC. I think we're very proud of it; a lot of people have commended us on the structure that we do use.

Another performance measure is enhanced economic opportunity, and I'll just give you an example, and here it is on page 4. I-30, buzz right on by the area of Cockrell Hill and you see it in the panel here where it's just a flat, open, dirt area. That's really true and that's the way it was forever; it really looked like that, the whole area.

And we had an opportunity to put an interchange there, TxDOT did, and for its $16.2 million that we spent on that interchange to make the traffic flow through there better and to open up that area, we got an investment, $193 million worth of investment.

I was by there yesterday, as a matter of fact, and you just couldn't believe all the industrial and commercial buildings that have gone up there, it didn't even look like the same place. And I think I noted in here that was a 3,900 percent increase in property values in five years.

That doesn't seem possible, but it is. It's really true. So we're very proud about that, and we know that economic opportunity should be used as a performance measure when we're talking about transportation.

The third performance measure that we use, and particularly near and dear to my heart, is decreasing air pollution. And we're in non-conformity, as all of you know, we're having a difficult time meeting the eight-hour standards.

Fifty percent of our air emissions come from mobile sources, and we know that, and just sit in the mixmaster where I-30 and I-35 meet any day, any time of the day, as a matter of fact, and you will see what we're talking about as far as cars spewing out emissions because they're just sitting there in traffic for hours at a time and it's really unfortunate.

We have a little model, we know that if we build out our project according to our mobility plan, in 2030 the air emissions obviously decrease every year, and we're very proud of that, and we always keep that in mind because air emissions are something that if we don't meet conformity, as you know, the US Transportation Department then can cut off your funding which we know will be a real problem. So we know that that's something that's very, very important to the region.

Increase in safety, we've done a lot of things through RTC to increase safety in the area. You might have been reading about the red light cameras. A lot of our cities, if they don't have red light cameras are considering red light cameras.

Richardson and Garland and some of the areas that have already instituted it have seen a dramatic decrease in traffic accidents. We had an RTC member several years ago get in a red-light-running accident, somebody ran a red light on her way home from RTC. So it's something that we talk about a lot, and that and our sobriety checks have really helped us out.

And I also think -- and I forgot to mention it but I'll mention it at this point -- RTC put a lot of money and TxDOT put a lot of money into making right-hand turns doubled and left-hand turns doubled so that we could get traffic moving through some of these major intersections in the Metroplex.

And that helped decrease air pollution but also helped increase safety because what people were doing was they could not get through a light, say they were going to turn left through a light, they could not get through that light on the signalization of it, and now that we've put in a double lane, twice as many cars can get through there. So it started to dramatically cut down on the number of people running that very late yellow light into a red light, and so we're proud of that as well.

And then increase asset value, I thought this was an interesting statistic on page number 5 at the very bottom. The traditionally financed freeway system from 2000 to 2030 is planned to expand from 660 miles to 730 miles. During that same period, using the financing tools that you've given us of the tollways and the managed lane system, we're going to expand that system from 25 miles to 700 miles of lanes.

So we're excited about that, we know that will help all the other performance measures in the top. That also helps us when we're using managed lanes and toll lanes to take the pressure off a lot of the maintenance money that comes into the region because they're maintained by that funding source.

So that's kind of an overview of our performance measures, and I'd be happy to answer questions.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I have just one, and I don't want to catch you off guard. Perhaps Michael needs to answer this, maybe not. The dark red area north of Dallas on what appears to be the north side of LBJ and extending up, I guess that is 75 to -- my memory won't come to me, but this area right in here, Michael.

MR. MORRIS: Yes, sir. That's 75 on the east up to 121 and Dallas North Toll Road.

MR. WILLIAMSON: It does not appear to decongest in the current plan.

MR. MORRIS: I think, Mr. Chairman, the best way to describe that -- and if you go to our Texas Metropolitan Mobility Plan, the area of far north Dallas is an area that has such demand and has such restricted corridors, the best way we can attack that is through an aggressive passenger rail system.

That passenger rail system, as you'll hear by one of our presenters, is contingent upon us being successful with the legislature on a half-cent sales tax and also is contingent on receiving either comprehensive development agreement funds or North Texas Tollway Authority funds or something to flex to that.

The other thing that has to occur in that part of the region -- and it's beginning to -- is a more sustainable land use transportation relationship. If you no longer have corridors to widen -- this already assumes LBJ is going to be built, it assumes the light rail line is extended to the north, and it assumes a 121 corridor being in place, you have a Dallas North Toll Road that's restricted in its ability to proceed to be widened, you're not going to solve that on the roadway capacity side, you're going to have to solve that on the passenger side and the land use transportation side.

This will be the focus of a new central business district that creates more walkable communities and other things as a way to get around. But that successful far north Dallas area has been the jewel of development for 25 years in North Texas.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I wasn't thinking on that in current discussions, but I ponder a lot the intensity with which every two years we invest our time on trying to figure out how to solve each other's problems, and it occurs to me that in North Texas we have an unusual situation, we have the population center that is congested and appears will continue to be congested, and we have the population center of tomorrow that we know is going to be congested and we have the opportunity to prepare for, and sometimes those two things are in conflict.

And I guess it's just incumbent upon the commission to ask the question if there's a part of the urban environment that we can be partners to decongest, tell us what more we need to do beyond what we're doing now, because citizens who live in that congested area are no more or no less important to us here than citizens that live in the dark red areas that would have been that apparently are not going to be dark red now.

If there's something else we can do, we need to know what it is we need to do. I think you've got five advocates here who we're concerned with the whole state but we are particularly concerned that the inner core of our three great urban areas, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, be preserved and become stronger as a component of economic development.

MR. MORRIS: If I could tie something back that Council Member Koop talked about, it's hard to locate on here, but that development that she talked about was an in-filled development just west of downtown. And one of the Regional Transportation Council's strategies is, as part of sustainable development, is by building either passenger or adding a passenger rail station, or incentivizing a developer go build a mixed-use development which is more walkable, or creating, in the case of Ms. Koop, a new interchange on Interstate 30, that in-filled development created the opportunity that that area will produce half as many vehicle miles of travel as a development that occurs at the Red River outside of our particular region because of trip length and so on and so forth.

So what the Regional Transportation Council does is looks at areas that may have excess capacity in some of our older areas of town that are underdeveloped and create financial incentives to do that.

So if I could leave you with one thought -- and I know the state often ignores the land use side as a place that's off limits because that's really a local decision, but if urban regions bring you partnership programs that somehow develop funding strategies for more sustainable development or in-filled accessibility that creates development within the core, we often have a pretty good thoroughfare system within some of those older parts of town, we just don't have the development to occur there. So the way you deal with some of these higher areas is to develop incentives on location decisions on the land use side that levels the development.

And later on you're going to hear from Charles Emery, maybe he could add a minute to what's happened in the older part of Lewisville with regard to the whole renaissance that's occurred there and the role passenger rail may play there to tie Linda's response to your question and maybe Charles Emery's presentation.

MS. KOOP: And can I just add one more thing to that? I know Michael has chatted with us for a long time about densifying our urban core, and when DART did their system plan update recently, Dallas had finally listened to Michael and said, We went through a process by which we determined that we were going to densify our urban core and therefore had more population in our urban core, and we even went so far to have an entire plan to do that and change our figures that COG was using and prove -- hopefully we're going to be able to prove it -- that we're going to have more people living downtown, more people living in the urban core area, and therefore, reduce congestion by using DART and Denton County Authority coming in as well. But by using the different transit authorities and hooking them onto DART and bringing them into the urban core, we think that we can densify it.

And we have a study group right now going on in downtown Dallas talking about how we can put incentives to bring rooftops into downtown, and so all these new people, especially young people, that are moving to town from out of state will look at downtown and say that's a place where I want to live because that's good urban living.

And the places that you see are red, hopefully that will turn to kind of pink because there will be less congestion in those areas because there will be all this excitement in the downtown urban core and people using mass transit and a streetcar system which we're considering right now.

So I mean, there's a lot of planning and forethought that has gone to not only the Mobility 2030 plan but has also gone out to other plans in Fort Worth and in Dallas and in Denton concentrating on doing sustainable development.

And Michael, to his credit, has started this Smart Code system whereby you change your building codes and your development codes in the city to become more sustainable, and he's got a model and we have been modeling our plans after that model.

So I mean, it's not just transportation, it's where we try to concentrate our living and our work and our play all together and we use mass transit to connect us to go out further to the new stadium in Arlington or wherever. So there's kind of a method to our madness, I guess, but we probably won't see it come to fruition for several years.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So I guess the presumption is --

(Pause.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: The only real issue is are they going to move out to Weatherford or are they going to move inside, and if they move inside, presumably the congestion that Fort Worth would experience in those people driving from Weatherford, where I live, over to Arlington or Dallas to work would be gone -- which is fine, I'm not making a case for don't improve Dallas for Weatherford, we'd just as soon you keep everybody for a while.

MS. KOOP: Exactly.

MR. WILLIAMSON: But that's the theory, the number of people moving is finite.

MS. KOOP: Absolutely the theory. And this is happening in Maryland, in the Washington, D.C. area. Development came out and they gobbled up all the farmland and then somebody finally said, Don't do that anymore, we won't have any farmland left. So they tried to concentrate the development back in towards the inner city.

Our inner city in the city of Dallas, you know, it's an aging infrastructure, we know we need street reconstruction, we know we need all those buildings to be filled up again, we've got capacity, and in a lot of the cities as well, Denton and Fort Worth and so on and so forth, we know there's capacity there that's just not being utilized, so we're trying to draw those people back in there before they gobble up all the prairie land to Oklahoma. We're not coming down towards Weatherford because you don't want us to.

(General laughter.)

MR. UNDERWOOD: Is that one of those projects?

MS. KOOP: That is one of those projects, right, absolutely. And there was nothing there but kind of a TXU-looking electrical power line things and a silo, it was a brown field, and they just came in and just wiped it all out, and now if you go by there today, there are high-rise condominium complexes. If you haven't gone by there recently, it's a mini Times Square, with the video boards going back and forth through the day, it's really cool.

MR. UNDERWOOD: I had a presentation there last week, so I saw that. So 75 acres that they're going to do something, that's really going to help, I think.

MS. KOOP: Incredible. And a downtown, no matter where it is, no matter if it's in Denton or Fort Worth or wherever, that's what a downtown should look like, an urban downtown, a downtown that's got a lot of people in that area, that's what an urban experience should be.

MR. UNDERWOOD: Where you're comfortable, you feel safe, and you have all the amenities that you need just nearby.

MS. KOOP: Right, exactly.

MR. UNDERWOOD: Very impressive.

MR. HOLMES: Ms. Koop, I'm very impressed with the reduction of congestion between the 2025 previous plan and the current plan, particularly considering that you're likely to add something close to 3 million people to the region in that time period. And knowing that it has to be a bit of a guesstimate, but are there any cost estimates attached to the plans that achieve this reduction in congestion?

MR. MORRIS: I was just looking, Ms. Koop, to see if we have that table. I think if you go to page 14, I'll conclude, Commissioner, with a summary of that process. Page 14 has the revenue that we think will be available for funding over the next 30 years, it involves $18 billion of new innovative finance that we didn't have previously which is why you're seeing the better picture, and then we document our still unfunded needs that are required in your Texas Metropolitan Mobility plan, a huge change in our ability to get at capacity.

We're still working, and why this Regional Transportation Council works so hard on forcing innovative finance, they know we have a huge rehabilitation of infrastructure cost in the out years and they wish to not leave it to their children to solve. But we'll go over that in a little more detail in the closing.

MR. HOLMES: I didn't mean to take you all the way to the end of the presentation.

(General laughter.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, I'm glad you asked that question, actually, because it gives, I think, everyone the opportunity to reinforce what I think we've been saying to the policymakers across the street and what I think local is saying to the policymakers: knowingly or not, for some of us knowingly, for some apparently not, the commission and the regions of the state have been working on a plan to build our way out of this problem for six years and that plan is in place and it will work.

It's perhaps, Michael, not the best plan, it's perhaps not the plan that we would all prefer, it certainly carries with it some discomfort for some of us, but it is a plan that will work, and these decongestion maps and, for me, the parallel improvement in air quality prove that.

I mean, I don't know how you can sit in a commission meeting and say I know we're going to attract jobs to Denton County because we resolved congestion in Dallas County. Intuitively we believe it but I don't know how to prove it. But you can prove decongestion by just simply measuring cars and saying this many more lanes, this more robust transit system and this sustained development will decongest downtown Dallas, that's going to happen, and when it does, air quality is going to improve, demand for maintenance dollars is going to shrink, and land values are going to go up.

Those are things that we all comfortably know will happen, but it's the result of a well thought out and fought for plan that's in place that sometimes causes people discomfort.

So thank you for your question. Please continue.

MAYOR TREVINO: I'm Oscar Trevino, the mayor of the City of North Richland Hills and the president of the Council of Governments Executive Committee.

I want to talk a little bit about Mobility 2030, and our metropolitan transportation plan for the Fort Worth-Dallas region actually identifies $71 billion in multimodal transportation solutions, and I'm saying multimodal transportation solutions because it takes -- on the next page you'll see about our regional mobility partnerships -- it takes a partnership to get this thing accomplished. And the reason we do it is not only for congestion mitigation but to try to do all we can to meet our air quality conformity that we need to.

The issues that Linda brought forward on what we're doing in sustainable development goes hand in glove with what we're doing here. If you look back at the chart that she showed on 2025 conditions current plan, we still have congestion, we're not going to get rid of the congestion with 3.3 million more people coming to our region over the next 20 years, but we can't just sit on our hands and do nothing.

Our Mobility 2030 actually includes 725 miles of freeways, tollways and managed lane facilities, it includes 480 miles of passenger rail, it includes the intelligent transportation system, truck lanes, air quality improvements, bicycle and pedestrian facilities, and many other improvements. Our final air quality determination should be coming out next month, we believe. But it takes a team, it takes local elected officials, it takes our transportation providers, it takes our two district engineers, and it takes the Texas Transportation Commission to help get to where we need to go.

We were afforded tools that help us with the funding and we are fighting as hard as we can to make sure that we retain those tools so that we can perform and build the plan that we have developed through local input and through local control.

You can read about regional mobility partnerships but it's hard to write down what we're living every day in working with the NTTA, in watching The T work with DART, with the Denton County authority, in having discussions with the three rail providers, invite the mayor of Frisco and the mayor of Duncanville and the mayor of North Richland Hills to discussions of how can we work together to provide transit for a region that is going to go where transit isn't at this point in time, how we work together.

You'll hear from these transportation providers momentarily about their accomplishments and partnerships, but we have superior toll roads, transit and aviation agencies serving Dallas-Fort Worth region and they each have their own specialties, but you can't talk about how close they work with the local municipalities, how The T meets with the City of North Richland Hills and DART works with the City of Dallas in their plan, or the City of Duncanville or others. Our local providers know their customers and they serve and strive to build, operate and maintain the transportation system that meets those specific customer needs.

We are facing challenges in a very rapidly growing rate. You can sit in our city hall and look out the window and see people parked for hours on 820, and also what's happening is those people get off 820 and they get on our city streets that our citizens pay to try to keep just our city streets maintained, those folks find those streets and find the shortcuts, as we all know, we all know the shortcuts in our regions. But not only is there significant growth in vehicle travel, but we are one of the largest distribution hubs in the nation without direct access to a border or water port, our truck traffic is growing just tremendously as well.

Because of these challenges, I think our leaders are using the tools provided by the legislature and the commission to work with regional facilities, with inner city facilities to not only officially move people and goods but to also work towards developing new living situations.

You talk about the city of Dallas, and that's the east side of the Metroplex, and you know, Bubba is not going to get out of his truck and live in a downtown region. Well, go over to Fort Worth and see what's happening there and they are. People do that, they do it in Dallas, they do it in Fort Worth and they're doing it throughout our region.

We are proud of the job our transportation providers are doing. They work well with the RTC, they work well with TxDOT, and they've been very involved in some of the most complex projects, and we work together well on a regular basis, not just when it's a major issue.

As you know, our traditional funding is not available to complete the transportation improvements required for our region. We are very nervous about our air quality conformity. If some things change over the processes that we have in place right now, we also have the fear of losing our federal funding and all of a sudden everything we've planned goes out the window.

We're using these innovative financial strategies provided by the legislature and the commission to build a comprehensive transportation system, it's not just more lane miles, it's a comprehensive plan. They include using bonding authority, leveraging of existing and future toll revenues, managed lane projects, integration with the Trans-Texas Corridor to fund construction and maintenance but also to provide a revenue stream for implementing other regional projects, including our rail needs for commuter rail.

A region as large and as diverse as Dallas-Fort Worth does not need a one-size-fits-all solution, we can't fit a cookie cutter solution to what we need. We need the agencies that we have and we need the NTTA, we need DFW Airport, we need Love Field, we need The T, DART, DCTA, and we need TxDOT, we need our two district engineers to continue their involvement to partner with the RTC so we can allow for an efficient transportation system that will help us through our air quality conformity.

We have a lot of good things going on in the region and we work together extremely well. I think you know that but I think it takes reiterating.

That's my presentation and if you have questions, I'll answer them, and if not, Paul is going to speak next.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Okay. Thank you, Oscar.

MR. WAGEMAN: Good morning, Mr. Chairman and commissioners. I'm Paul Wageman, chairman of the North Texas Tollway Authority. I'm joined here today by two of my colleagues, our vice chairman, Jack Miller from Denton County, and the board member from Tarrant County, Bill Meadows. I'm very pleased to be here to be able to visit with the commission today and to join our transportation partners from the region, these business leaders that have come here with us today, and elected officials.

And I'm very pleased to pick up on the comments that my predecessor, Mr. Trevino ,and the chairman of the commission has made regarding partnerships. We in North Texas, particularly at the NTTA, could not do what we do without the strong partnership that we have with the Department of Transportation, particularly the two district engineers that represent your agency in our region, Bill Hale and Maribel Chavez.

They are fine public servants, they have the interest of the citizens that they represent at heart, and we have very much appreciated our long and productive relationship with both of them.

My task today -- and I just refer you to pages 8 and 9 of our handout -- is to really talk to you about some of the things that we've been involved in the last year and some of the things going forward that the tollway authority is looking to do in the region to enhance mobility and to improve the quality of the air that we breathe.

As the department knows, we entered in an agreement last year which provides for the authority to study, at the outset, five projects in our region to help determine the appropriate delivery method, and those projects are all critical to mobility in the region and some are very significant in terms of scope, and they're provided for in the brochure but I think they're worth enumerating here.

One is the Southwest Parkway which is a long talked about, much planned project in Tarrant County from downtown Fort Worth down to the southern part with a connection to currently a state-built, tax-supported road, and that's a project that we've been involved in for well over 20 years and we're looking forward to breaking ground on that project at the end of the year or first part of next year.

We've worked very closely with the City of Fort Worth; it's a partnership that has been very productive in trying to bring a very innovative type project, it's going to be the first all-electronic toll road that the authority has built. And that's an area that we're going to continue to examine in the region, and TxDOT has led the way in that regard with their plans for 121 and the roads you've built here in Central Texas.

Another project that we're evaluating is State Highway 170 which is a limited access roadway in southern Denton County and northern Tarrant County. It will provide much needed connectivity to Fort Worth's Alliance Airport from the DFW region and will enhance the logistics hub that Oscar has talked about earlier.

State Highway 360 will create a new limited access roadway in southeast Tarrant County, northwest Dallas and northeast Johnson counties. It's an alternate relief route for Interstate Highway 35W and 35E through the Metroplex. It will also improve connectivity between the proposed southern section of the Metroplex Outer Loop and the DFW Airport.

State Highway 190, the fourth of these five projects, will connect Loop 9, State Highway 190 and the President George Bush eastern extension as part of the outer loop around Dallas County.

And then lastly, but certainly not least, a project near and dear to the heart of Councilwoman Koop, is the Trinity Parkway, another very important reliever route in the heart of downtown Dallas, has a lot of issues surrounding it but it's a project that we've appreciated the opportunity to be a part of for many years, working with the city, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Transportation.

I think it's important to emphasize another project that we've been engaged with the department on for many years trying to bring forward to fruition, and that's the eastern extension of the President George Bush in eastern Dallas County. We've worked with your staff, both in the district with Bill Hale and his office, as well as your administrative staff here in Austin, and last week our board met and approved the final agreement with the department so that we can move this project forward.

We are told that every month of delay on this project increases the cost by $4 million. $4 million adds up over time, this is a very expensive project, and we very much would appreciate the commission's consideration of this agreement at its next meeting in the month of April. To a degree there's more work to be done on that, we need to get it done, but we sure would appreciate this getting completed next month. This is the two-party agreement and a toll equity grant that we've made application for.

MR. WILLIAMSON: How does that work out with the current rethinking about 121? Was that part of the protocol?

MR. WAGEMAN: This project was given to us -- or restated, I guess, that it was an NTTA project to the protocol, correct. This is the revenue-sharing agreement and the toll equity grant for the purposes of acquiring right of way.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So would that be influenced by any decision that the NTTA made to do 121 differently, your ability to do the project?

MR. WAGEMAN: No. It may enter into your thinking on that, I don't know, but we're ready to go.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I'm sorry I interrupted you.

MR. WAGEMAN: Tolling services agreement is also an agreement that our staff and your staff worked very diligently on last year to create. It was part of this agreement we executed late last year, provides for the NTTA to be the toll collector on all CDA projects in the region for the first five years. We've completed that agreement, and subject to Cintra's executing their agreement with you, we'll be prepared to move forward with them and begin to collect tolls.

I think it's fair to say the region is best served by a single toll collector, one point of contact for the customer. Our agency prides itself and invests a significant amount of resources in customer service, we do a very good job at it and we think it's a real service and value to the region.

And then lastly, and certainly not least, is the legislative initiatives that the agency has undertaken this session. It's really been the practice of our agency over the past ten years to really not come before the legislature to seek very much in the way of authority, but times have changed.

The competition that's come into our region requires us to be able to have the same tools that private firms and that the State of Texas has to be able to be as competitive as we can and to bring best value to the region. We appreciate the department's support of our legislative initiative and their commitment to seeing that the NTTA has similar authority to RMAs, CDAs and the department itself.

We also have an important governance change that we're committed to which will help, I think, bring our region together and will allow for a more effective operation at our board level, and that's also the subject of legislation currently before the legislature.

Again, just to reiterate the comments previously made, it's a partnership that we value very significantly. We could not do what we do without the fine work and the commitment the department has, the RTC, the communities in which we operate, and we look forward to continuing to enhance those relationships in the years to come. Thank you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Members?

MR. HOLMES: Just one comment, Paul. The cost increase of $4 million a month on one project really underscores the problem in delay, and if it's $4 million a month on this one, then there is some cost implication on every other project, and when you already have constrained sources of funding, delay is not our friend.

MR. WAGEMAN: Commissioner, I couldn't agree with you more. We're looking at the Trinity project which has had significant delays and continues to have environmental issues and design-related issues come forward, that project has now ballooned up to a billion-dollar project, and I'm confident by the time we get to design and construction of the road, it will be significantly north of a billion dollars. So delay is not friendly to the region or to the providers of transportation, and so we all need to work more effectively.

And Chairman Williamson asked earlier about ways maybe that we could do things differently, and I think one observation I have -- and I'm not in the weeds on this in terms of all the back and forth -- but to the degree you can devolve authority to your districts and let them make the decisions, it will make, I think, a faster process for the local agencies to work with them in terms of our partnerships. You have to approve these agreements ultimately, but to the degree your district engineers and their staffs can really represent the agency without a lot of back and forth with headquarters, I think it would help.

MR. WILLIAMSON: We'll have to talk to some senators about that, I'm sure. I couldn't pass that one up.

(General laughter.)

MR. WAGEMAN: I'm not suggesting there be statutory change, Chairman.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I'm thinking about the statutory changes that might be coming as opposed to the ones that need to be made.

I have a couple of questions, and I don't want to preempt you, Ted, because I know you've got some things that you're interested in discussing with Paul.

We committed long ago to supporting the NTTA's decision to acquire the authority of not only comprehensive development agreement issuance but I think certain other authorities that would give NTTA more local muscle. I am curious how you see a comprehensive development agreement playing out if the legislature were to extend that authority. In real life, how would you see NTTA applying it?

And let me give you an example. If the legislature passed the legislation that's pending that we're all familiar with today and the governor signed it, and you made the management decision that the George Bush east extension was a good candidate for a comprehensive development agreement, would you do that because the RTC had said that's what we want you to do, or would you do that because your business model suggested to you that you're better off taking your equity and going someplace else and selling a CDA on the 161? How would that work?

MR. WAGEMAN: I presume you mean the moratorium on CDAs, is that what you're referring to, in terms of if that were to happen?

MR. WILLIAMSON: No. If the legislature were to grant comprehensive development agreement authority to the toll authority, how would you see that playing out?

MR. WAGEMAN: First of all, we think CDAs are a very useful tool. We're obviously seeking that authority and power to be able to manage CDAs for the region. We can't do this in a vacuum, we obviously have to work with the RTC on what the best delivery mechanism is.

We finance our roads, Chairman, based on system financing, so at some point if the agency is doing projects that are less financially feasible and turning over to the private sector projects that are financially feasible and good quality toll projects, there will be a day of reckoning at some point where our system can't support what we're doing, so you have to be cognizant of that.

There are some projects that are, candidly, I think excellent CDA projects that maybe are not best suited for the tollway authority, but we can manage those projects and be the one to staff them here in the region.

MR. WILLIAMSON: In practical terms -- again, I'm trying to get to the mechanics of how it would work -- under the law, as I understand it, if it were passed and signed by the governor, NTTA would have the authority to identify a project and say we think that is a good candidate for a comprehensive development agreement. Now, I'm assuming it would be working through the planning process.

MR. WAGEMAN: Right, correct.

MR. WILLIAMSON: So would you supervise the development of the criteria, would you issue the request for proposal?

MR. WAGEMAN: That is what's been anticipated in discussions with the region and with your department district office.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And if there were a concession fee, would that go to NTTA or would that go to the region, how would that work?

MR. WAGEMAN: I don't know really how the legislation anticipates it but I can't imagine it coming into our system, it would be part of the region's.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I'm not saying that would be a bad thing, Paul, at all, because that gets me to my second question. If primacy is important to the region, would it not make sense to also go ahead and expand the boundaries of the authority to match up the boundaries of the COG?

MR. WAGEMAN: Well, I know this is a policy issue that you have a high level of interest in. I think there are some in the region that are supportive, others who are not. We have the ability currently under our existing statute to add additional counties. We hope once we get Southwest Parkway built we'll be able to bring Johnson County into the authority at some point -- they've expressed that interest. So it's a big question, Chairman, whether we expand to the size of the COG or not.

Our agency, though essentially its antecedents date back almost 50 years, we're still a fairly young agency, about ten years old, and we were used to building projects one at a time. Our financial strength was limited in the early years, as you'll remember, when this transition occurred from the TTA to NTTA, but we do have a very strong financial system and we need to be more aggressive, our board is focused on being more aggressive and building more projects in the region and bringing mobility solutions throughout the region.

So we're not averse to a larger field of service but we think it can be addressed currently under our statute.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, it seems to me that what I hear Michael saying, I think, what I hear the RTC saying is we prefer NTTA to be the toll operator of the region, but when he says that, I presume he's speaking of the COG boundaries and not of just one or two counties.

I've been asked by several people in the past month to do what the commission can do to put in place a lot of stability for the next 20 years so that the region can grow without wasting energy on some of the things we waste energy on, and there seems to be one thing that could be done is to just expand the boundaries to match up with the COG and make the clear statement that NTTA is the hometown operator and perhaps even constructor.

MR. WAGEMAN: I want to be clear, we want to be more than the operator, we want to be the developer and operator where it's appropriate, and I think what we are in agreement on is we don't necessarily have to be the developer of every project. I think the region would like us to be the operator, the collector of tolls and the customer service provider for all the projects.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I think everybody in the region would like that.

MR. WAGEMAN: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: You know, it's a difficult thing balancing the fact that Dallas County is the absolute super giant population center of the region, and that has to be honored against where the growth is going to occur, it's a difficult thing to balance that.

MR. WAGEMAN: We need to not undermine the financial strength of the system, we need to be cognizant of the contributions that our two really fundamental core counties, Dallas and Collin, make to that financing, but we are a regional authority, we're proud of it, we have four counties who make us up and are equal, in my mind as chairman of the authority, they're not a junior county and a senior county.

But we need to be focused on what are good quality projects that will not be detrimental to the ultimate strength of the system but we need to get over into those counties and build roads, and we're doing that. We're building Lake Lewisville Toll Bridge in Denton County, we're building Southwest Parkway in Tarrant County, so soon we will have projects in all four of our core counties.

MR. WILLIAMSON: And hopefully soon Loop 9. Ted.

MR. HOUGHTON: Well, I think what may get lost in all of this -- and Michael, you brought it up a little earlier -- is the end of the presentation on page 14, the $58 billion worth of need in the area, and it's of my opinion that there's no one developer/provider that can meet all of that need. And with that said, it's the collaboration, Paul, that you and I talk about, the three-legged stool that I refer to with Michael: the RTC, TxDOT, NTTA.

And as Bill Meadows and I ran into each other in an alley yesterday, and we were talking about how to resolve the issues of the Metroplex.

MR. WAGEMAN: Was it a dark alley?

MR. HOUGHTON: It was light. It was during the daylight hours and he didn't have a weapon.

MR. WAGEMAN: That's what I'm concerned about.

(General laughter.)

MR. HOUGHTON: But I guess to yours, Mr. Chairman, being the developer, it's like saying there's one solution across the board for the goal and the need and I believe that there's going to have to be multi, whether it's DART, that there is a place for concessions, there is a place for CDAs, there is a place for NTTA, and there's a place for TxDOT, and how we get to that point is going to take some heavy lifting and park the egos at the door -- which I hope we can get to. That's a statement. I don't know what the end product is going to look like but it's going to take a lot of work.

That's all I have.

MR. WAGEMAN: I want to be clear, we want to be more than an operator but we don't necessarily consider ourselves of having to be the sole developer, and I think that's very clear if we have CDA projects that we can manage the process for the region. We obviously think CDAs are appropriate, otherwise, we wouldn't be seeking that authority.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, the thing I'm attracted to about the CDA process is it crystallizes the value of a 121, it crystallizes the cost to build it and the value of it to the entire region. And I've just always sensed that competition is a good thing for all of us.

It's a good thing for Ben in the newspaper business; it's a good thing for me in the political business or the natural gas business; I think it's a good thing in the highway construction business. It forces everybody to kind of deal with what is the true value of something.

MR. WAGEMAN: I think there's clearly benefits from a valuation perspective, but for ourselves as an agency, it's also helped us get focused on really the critical mission the region has and that we have to be more than we were in the past. That's not to be critical of our role in the past, but we just have to be able to do more, we have to leverage our system in a greater way, and we need to be not as risk-averse maybe as we have been in the past.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Don't be afraid. Is that what is? My favorite introductory remark to our staff: Don't be afraid.

Anything else, members?

(No response.)

MR. WILLIAMSON: Please continue.

MR. EMERY: Good morning. My name is Charles Emery. I chair the board of the Denton County Transportation Authority, and as Mr. Morris said before, I do sit on the RTC.

Just a couple of quick introductions before we get started. Today we have the three presidents of the three transit entities here with us: Mr. Gary Thomas -- if you might raise your hand when I introduce you -- president of DART; Dick Riddell; who is president of the Fort Worth Transportation Authority; and we have also John Hedrick, who is president of our authority, Denton County Transportation Authority. And we thank those fellows for coming.

I've been chairman of DCTA for about six years. I've had a great passion for transit, but I really never knew how exciting transportation could be until I got in highways and toll roads on the RTC. I'm having a great time, it's a great challenge.

I want to make reference to the two pages that we have of your handout, pages 10 and 11, and we did just adopt the format of the goals of TxDOT right there in front of you on the left page which is page 10. You'll see those goals repeated several times through this brochure. But I wanted to call your attention to the accomplishments in transit as they pertain to those goals.

Under decrease congestion, that little paragraph there, a couple of things that really are noteworthy, I believe, for transit. Through multimodal equipment and HOV lanes, the three transit entities have carried over 100 million passengers annually, and that number is increasing, incidentally. It did in '06 between 5 and 13 percent, depending on what are of the region you were in.

All three transit entities have rail programs in progress at this juncture. DART, of course, has a 28-mile system coming out of Dallas going into north Carrollton; that is under construction. The Fort Worth Transportation Authority has a 40-mile segment in the planning and environmental phase, going from southwest Fort Worth to Grapevine which is the north end of the airport.

And of course, we have a 21-mile segment that will connect with DART in north Carrollton and go to Denton hopefully at the end of 2010. So we have about 90 miles of rail under development in that whole process.

We want to assure you that the rail entities are focused on seamless connectivity in this regional rail system. And that regional rail system -- I'll make reference to it in a couple of points -- is in the middle of page 11 on the right-hand side of those two pages.

Under economic opportunity, the enhancement of that, I think DART is a great template there and I'll just use that. It does note that in DART's rail system they've created $3.3 billion of transit-oriented development around their rail systems. In all of these systems, both the commercial and residential increases once the rail systems go in.

I was asked to just comment very quickly about Lewisville, Texas, and that's maybe just a microcosm of what's been happening in Dallas and Fort Worth and other areas with the rail system. When we developed our rail service plan, very shortly thereafter it was adopted, we had Pulte Homes to come in around the Old Town area of Lewisville, Texas where the rail system will traverse and bring in 140 town home units immediately and it was because it was within walking distance of the Old Town rail system in Lewisville, Texas, and I mean, the ink hadn't dried on our service plan when that happened.

So we're pleased to say that the sustainable development, transit-oriented development program is alive and well and growing in our region in the rail system.

Decreasing air pollution, with the number of passengers we have on our system, I think you can just see readily that we have taken a bunch of cars off the road. Not only that, but we have been sufficiently using clean and low-emission fuels which all of our entities are using now in big quantities. We are truly making a major contribution to regional solutions to resolving our non-attainment status.

Under increase safety which is also on that page, it does go almost without saying that public transportation is one of the safest and most reliable modes of transportation or travel in the U.S., and I'll say it again, it truly is.

Increase asset value almost goes, again, without saying because our system is growing as our population is rapidly increasing.

I heard Oscar say a few minutes ago, I think, in the previous portion that total planned miles in the regional rail system that you see on page 11 is about 480 miles. The miles that are developed or under development are those in that 90 I included in the previous statement. There's about 165 miles of it either developed or under development at this juncture.

We have noticed that we had a funding problem on the balance of that rail system, as you might expect, as we are on highways, so about a year and a half ago the three transit entities introduced a funding mechanism using sales taxes -- which is the traditional funding mechanism for transit locally -- and we introduced something called the Tri-Party Agreement at which time we said that perhaps the best way to fund the balance of this system is to ask the legislature to allow us to exempt the transit sales tax from under the cap.

And that was the Tri-Party Agreement we referred to, signed off by the transit entities. Not only was it an exemption but it was done on a local option basis which was very important to us. It's now reflective in Senate Bill 257 and House Bill 2087 which will go into hearings next week and certainly we're making progress in that area.

In addition, on the Tri-Party Agreement we had a couple of statements that are important to us. We believe that the expansion of the regional rail system in the Dallas-Fort Worth region is more efficiently done with these three entities, we don't need a fourth entity to do that.

We are working well together, we have a partnership that I think is started to play out in a task force that we have formed to look at common rail equipment, to look at perhaps common maintenance facilities, those kinds of things that you would expect out of a coordinated system in the DFW region.

We have had great support in the region for this concept of exempting the transit sales tax, and at the top of page 11 you'll see that we state that we have over 100 resolutions -- that number is about 104 today -- of cities, counties and business and civic organizations representing about 85 percent of the region that says: Go for it, we think this is a great idea, the rail system is important to our mobility and solving air quality problems in our region.

Not only that, but I call your attention to the bottom of page 11 which says that basically we have citizen support with a number of either elections, there's a survey in there and so forth that exceeds 70 percent supporting regional rail. So we think it's well on the way in the region and we are certainly behind that as a great component of the mobility solutions in our region.

We're growing at an incredible rate, it's just unbelievable. I've been in Denton County most of my life -- and I think you were talking about Weatherford, Mr. Chair, a few minutes ago -- we have had them to come our way in big quantities, and I knew early on -- and that's one reason why I got involved in transit, quite frankly, is to accelerate solutions to mobility which is certain for Denton County and other counties in North Texas.

I do believe that we have a strong leadership infrastructure in our region, and when I say that I call out the RTC, I call out the DRMC and the TRTC which are working very much cooperatively together. I think we have the best professionals in the country, in my mind, in the RTC and COG with Michael Morris and his team, who I've spent a lot of time with the last three years, and we have great partners in TxDOT, and I call out again Bill Hale and Maribel Chavez leading our region.

I want to thank you for having us and thank you for hearing us, that you've been so good to do, even coming to our region. And I'll take any questions that you might have.

MR. HOUGHTON: I've got one I've had for a long time. How does rail or the authorities get involved in HOV lanes?

MR. EMERY: Gary Thomas is with us, he's been doing this for a long time, and maybe Gary would like to just stand up and just talk about that a little bit.

MR. HOUGHTON: I fail to see the rail component in an HOV lane.

MR. THOMAS: Certainly. Thank you, Commissioner. Gary Thomas.

MR. HOUGHTON: Sit down, Gary. You don't have to stand up and be formal.

MR. THOMAS: Thank you.

Several years ago, DART became part of the process in solving the transportation needs through HOV lanes as well as the rail and bus systems, and so as a result, now we work very closely with Bill Hale and the Dallas District to develop and operate, and it's a partnership that we partially fund.

We split the funding 50-50 on the local match, and TxDOT will share the design process, and sometimes TxDOT will design them, sometimes we'll design them, and then TxDOT will construct them, we manage those HOV lanes, and as I say, we work very closely in the total operation of the HOV lanes.

And the way it works, again, is it's a total system. Not any one component of a transportation system works well independently, and so with the transit authority operating HOV lanes, working with TxDOT, then the buses, all the different modes start to come together.

MR. HOUGHTON: Okay. Mike, I have a question. Are you anticipating using any concessions off of these projects in the Metroplex area on rail, for expansion of?

MR. MORRIS: Yes, sir, several come to mind. Ms. Koop talked about extending rail into downtown Dallas as part of our sustainable development, using trolleys and other types of vehicles. We've had two or three meetings on that. We wish to build a rail component parallel to the NAFTA corridor that's part of the Denton County transportation plan that will connect Carrollton and the DART system with the city of Denton. So we're penciling in a partnership with the Denton County sales tax money to advance that particular rail service.

We're working on rail service -- and I think Jeff is going to talk about this in a minute -- from southwest Fort Worth near TCU through downtown Fort Worth to a rail line, the first rail line entering DFW International Airport which we want to partner those particular issues.

And when you see elected officials very excited about the negative impact on a moratorium, it's because these up-front payments are going to be used not just to make sure LBJ gets built and not just to make sure the Funnel gets built, but to create these partnerships with our transportation rail partners to advance not just rail but high occupancy vehicle lanes on LBJ and managed lanes on those particular facilities and on the Funnel. So these revenue sources, as we met with your staff yesterday, are very fungible as a result.

MR. HOUGHTON: Is that a real word?

MR. MORRIS: I don't know. I use it once a week and it's a pretty effective tool because if you think you know what it means, then it shows you the flexibility or dynamics that money can do, if you don't know what it means, you don't dare ask and it sounds like you know what the hell we're talking about.

(General laughter.)

MR. MORRIS: But meeting with your staff yesterday, there seems to be -- and this hasn't really entered the debate yet, but it seems like CDA up-front payments won't come with the same strings attached, potentially, that the federal funds do, and you hear these elected officials, and commissioners, you've talked about the impact of inflation, the hidden benefits of this is either NTTA or a CDA creating up-front payments may create a revenue stream to streamline project delivery not on the roadway side but also in transit operations -- we have a new statewide initiative on transit operations -- and in building our traditional modes of transportation.

If you look at the inflation cost, we may get more value from expediting projects by reduced inflation than we may actually get from the up-front payments from those particular facilities, and that may be the real exciting element of that. So since they don't come with federal funds attached, maybe, then they are more fungible to be able to help us build more projects.

MR. HOUGHTON: Have you full planned the $2.8 billion concession fee?

MR. MORRIS: No. The Regional Transportation Council began in February with meetings in each county. The RTC wishes the local policy officials to assist in making recommendations to them. The letter that the Regional Transportation Council sent out on Monday instructed our staff to be completed with that process by October.

So the RTC prides itself in a bottom-up approach and we are holding meetings with the communities within the region to identify what those projects will be.

MR. HOUGHTON: So the answer to my original question was that you are anticipating using concessions on the rail projects.

MR. MORRIS: Yes.

MR. WILLIAMSON: You know, Michael, one of the things that still eludes me is the ability to quantify the dollar value of the relief in congestion and improvement in air quality and the increase in safety and the job retention and the avoided maintenance as a result of building something right now that you otherwise would have had to have built 25 years ago.

A case in point for Central Texas, I suppose, is our decision in June to move forward with 130 South, a $1 billion asset that would be built in 20 or 25 years is now going to have some impact on the maintenance costs of 35, the congestion people between San Antonio and Austin experience, the air quality in San Antonio and Austin, the job retention in Central Texas, and yet one of the barriers that we have all run into across the street is trying to explain how you balance some potential unknown possible loss of revenue if traffic is greater than we think against the known benefit today of building something that we couldn't otherwise build. I think we all struggle with how to quantify that with the policymakers across the street in a way that it's understandable.

MR. MORRIS: Yes, that there are ways to mechanically do it, I sometimes find then the debate shifts to the mechanical equations and we start arguing about are those equations the right equations to measure those particular benefits.

I'll tell you what the benefits of local policy officials are in these decisions, however, because they live in this situation every single day, they know their community very well, people now have cell phones, they're called all the time when one of their constituents is sitting in a particular traffic jam.

We're thinking about now doing traffic counts in the region by simply keeping the phone logs of the elected officials as a way to reduce our field operations on those facilities.

(General laughter.)

MR. MORRIS: Once elected officials sit down and say okay, you get $2.1 billion plus you get out year payments so your colleagues behind you can do things, and then here are the projects that are ready to go, and you have a series of needs, safety, air quality, and you start placing those particular dollar amounts and then we show them performance maps; we show them air quality performance measures; we show them the change in color of the maps. It is very easy for them to develop what is that system, that comprehensive system of improvements.

Yes, there are numbers that assist them but everyone in our region knows that LBJ has to go to construction as soon as possible, everyone knows that if we don't build the Trinity project or something in downtown Dallas, we cannot make any other radial improvements, everyone knows in the west that Airport Freeway 820/183 has to go to construction.

And as things occur that make things nervous that up-front payments or other things may not occur makes the local policy officials even madder because it is so clear to them -- and I'll conclude with the impacts on inflation, and Mr. Holmes, you talked about this --

It is so clear to them that these projects desperately need to go to construction -- and I think the local elected officials have an advantage because they deal with this every single day, and our chair talked about that in the introduction -- where some of the state officials aren't the ones that the people are necessarily calling so they may not be in a position to necessarily be aware that LBJ, the Funnel and Airport Freeway are potentially impacted by some of these decisions.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Well, it just seems to me one of our struggles is to be able to carry cogent arguments across the street, and it seems to me the arguments kind of boil down to we've been underfunded for a number of years and we're way behind and we have to do something quickly to leap frog back to a starting point that makes sense versus we shouldn't be letting our transportation systems be owned or operated by someone else versus the value of building 121 or 130 South or 288 today outstrips the value of what we might lose 29 years from now in potential toll collections if we underestimated the number of people who would buy tolls. The arguments are starting to clarify.

Now, it seems to me both arguments depend upon some kind of faith that you're making good decisions about the future, but so far the cogent argument that the five of us are looking for to take across the street and say this is the single most important thing about this entire donnybrook, the single most important thing is congestion from Point A to Point B will not improve until these five assets are on the ground.

MR. MORRIS: And maybe the whole notion we learned in school, that the system is greater than the sum of its parts. The purpose of the partners putting this report together this year to you was potentially for you to use this tool across the street and try to put in pictures the notion of this system of transportation improvements that is leveraged in a way to beat the impacts of inflation on that particular system, and have local policy officials monitor those issues like they have in the past two weeks on the no compete clause, like they have with regard to the buyback issues, like they have with the up-front values, like they have with inviting the North Texas Tollway to participate in that process.

You don't develop a plan, walk away and come back in 30 years to see how well you do. This is an item that is monitored monthly with regard to what's the best way to proceed. So we're hoping this document creates a vision and a story that helps you across the street with regard to some of these particular concerns.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Hey, Charles, would it help if we could get UP and BNSF and Kansas City to move outside of the air shed and give you their lines? Would that be something we could assist with?

(General laughter.)

MR. EMERY: I believe, Mr. Chair, I'd just rather work cooperatively with them -- which is happening today, as a matter of fact.

MS. ANDRADE: Mr. Chairman, I have a comment. I just want to say that, Charles, I'm so happy to see you at the table representing public transit in your region.

MR. EMERY: Well, thank you, thank you very much.

MS. ANDRADE: It's great to see you.

And DART, I'm very proud of you. I attended the ribbon-cutting ceremonies when you first opened the light rail and I've watched you closely, and you certainly are leading our state, and I hope San Antonio one day does what you've done in your area.

And I have a question. Fort Worth Transportation Authority, how did you come to calling yourselves The T?

MR. EMERY: They came up with that name before I got there. Some think it's Tarrant County, some think it's Texas, and some think it's Transportation. It's like fungible, whatever you want to use it for.

(General laughter.)

MS. ANDRADE: Well, for whatever reason, I like it.

MR. HOLMES: I have just one brief comment. I'm really impressed by the percentage by which some of these votes were taken and passed and approved. It shows great support for The T and DCTA and DART. In fact, it's remarkable support, not all regions in Texas show this kind of support for transit.

Can you just reflect a little bit on how you achieved these 70-plus percent margins?

MR. EMERY: Well, they're individual efforts, as you might see. I will start with my own which is Denton County Transportation Authority. That was a very tedious process and I picked it up right out of the legislature in the 77th Legislature, Chapter 460. But about three of us took off around our county after developing a service plan, and we did 125 public meetings, and we went to the people.

It was grassroots, and I guess if there's one underlying foundational thing that we did and that was take it to the grassroots level, and we effectively sold the service plan or we changed it to the extent that citizens wanted it changed, and that's where we got our 73 percent.

The rest of these are pretty much the same. The need is there, that's another driving force: the need is there. And perhaps even more foundational in all of that, we've proved to ourselves that the most valuable thing to people is their time and the best thing you can do for them is save it, and that's what happens here.

MS. WHITE: And I think it's really indicative, not only in Denton County but across the region -- and Charles just touched on it -- is the culture of the counties have changed. I mean, they're sitting in traffic for two hours or four hours a day and it's their time.

And this is one of the things they said in their presentations in Denton County, ten years ago you wouldn't have gotten these percentages, but because they're sitting in traffic day-in, day-out, minute by minute, hour by hour, and they're waiting to take their kid to the soccer game and they're not going to get there, they're going to be late, all these things, they're going to be late to work, I think you see a culture saying we need multimodal transportation solutions.

MR. FEGAN: Good morning. My name is Jeff Fegan. I'm the CEO for the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and I greatly appreciate the opportunity today to speak on regional aviation services.

We have seen significant progress in the region in terms of aviation but probably the most significant accomplishment has been the resolution of the Right Amendment. The cities of Dallas and Fort Worth, as well as Southwest Airlines and American Airlines and DFW this past year came to agreement, the law was signed into place in October of this year, and the effect has been that through Love Field, through ticketing is permitted. In eight years the amendment will go away completely. The other focus was to designate DFW Airport as the primary international airport for North Texas.

So what you have seen, even in the short period of time, is that we have seen greater competition, lower fares and more passengers. Love Field today handles nearly 7 million passengers, but DFW Airport is actually the third busiest airport in the world in terms of landings and takeoffs and the sixth busiest airport in the world in terms of passengers. We handled 60 million passengers last year in 2006.

We recently completed a $2.7 billion capital development program that involved building a new international terminal building, a new Grand Hyatt Hotel, the Skylink. If any of you have experienced the new Skylink people mover, it really has changed how DFW is perceived by everyone. In fact, just the other day, ACI, Airports Council International, through a 200-passenger survey worldwide, ranked Dallas-Fort Worth the number one in North America for customer service.

We actually were ranked number two in the world for airports that were 40 million passengers and number five in the world overall. So we weren't probably in the top 20 before all this development took place, but today now we're recognized as one of the best customer service airports in the world.

The importance of air cargo from a regional economic growth standpoint also cannot be understated. This past year we were very fortunate to win the designation of the best cargo airport in the world by Air Cargo World. They do a survey every year of tenants and from around the world we actually got rated number one.

We have about 750,000 tons of cargo going through DFW Airport, we had a 12 percent increase in cargo this past year, we had a 21 percent increase in international cargo, largely driven by trade with Asia. We had a number of new Asian cargo carriers start service and we really are seeing a tremendous amount of growth in this area. We have over 200 cargo flights per week at DFW Airport.

Of course, Alliance is also experiencing growth in cargo. They now represent about 20 percent of the air cargo in the region and they have a very large Federal Express operation at Alliance.

None of this, however, could have happened without the help of the transportation partners that you see at the table here today and in the audience. These are the folks who provide us access by roads, rail and bus. We're located in the center of the region and we also are surrounded by many congested highways, but we have seen some significant investment. In the last two years, about $370 million has been spent on projects such as State Highway 360 and the George Bush Turnpike.

Over the next ten years we're anticipating about $3.4 billion worth of investment on projects such as the DFW connector, State Highway 161, 183, 114, and 121. All of these greatly affect accessibility to DFW Airport.

Today both Love Field and DFW are currently served by bus, but the real change that we're very much excited about and looking forward to is the rail access service that is planned to DFW Airport by both The T as well as DART, and soon you will see a new service. I look to Gary all the time to give me the date, but sometime after 2012 is expected for both of those entities to provide direct rail service into DFW Airport, and we're actually planning a very large integrated rail station in the central terminal area to accept this new service.

And finally, we have a very interesting and important relationship and partnership with the NTTA. Toll tags have been almost the preferred way of entering the airport. I know Love Field has the same type of service. About 25 percent of all the transactions going through our toll plazas are actually using the toll tags, so that is something that really helps capacity at DFW Airport.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Now, are these people just going from north to south?

MR. FEGAN: No. These are all of our parkers. We have 40,000 parking spaces at the airport. Some are going through, a few people are going through, but most everybody is there to park, but they're able to actually pay for their parking using the toll tags now, so it's really speeded up our lines quite a bit, has increased capacity, and people love it. It's really been a great new addition to the airport.

We also have been working with TxDOT and NTTA in way-finding signage to direct people from a variety of different locations into DFW Airport.

So these are just some of the examples of how this region is really working together in a partnership to provide seamless transportation to DFW Airport, and it's a pleasure to work with all these various entities. They're all very professional, very, very competent, and they do a great job, and from DFW's perspective, we're very pleased to be part of this event today. Thank you very much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Are you going to be sharing your part of the Barnett Shell Gas money?

MR. FEGAN: No, sir, that's not part of the plan right now. We're a very capital-intensive entity and we'll use every bit of that money, but thank you for asking.

(General laughter.)

MR. HOUGHTON: I have a question, Mr. Chairman. Of the 60 million passengers that you service through that airport, how much of that is through-put, how much is domestic, and can you quantify the business traveler coming to do business in the Metroplex, or tourist, slash tourist?

MR. FEGAN: Just some general information. Sixty million total passengers. About 6 million passengers are actually international passengers, so that's one of the fastest growing components of our business. Of the 60 million passengers, 35 percent are local, people coming to or leaving the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, 65 percent are connecting. So we are still a very significant large hub connecting complex in North America.

Business travel is a very, very important part of our mix, that's why it's such an attractive place to provide airline service. I believe we're probably 55 percent business, 45 percent leisure using DFW Airport. It's a great market and we have a tremendous amount of service, we have service to 168 destinations from DFW nonstop, 35 of which are international destinations.

MR. MORRIS: Mr. Chairman, let us conclude our presentation. If it wasn't for the leadership of this commission and staff and all the leaders behind me today, we would have never seen the magnitude of accomplishment that we present to you today.

I'd like to review the progress quickly on page 14 and 15, and the theme, I guess, I leave with you is basically look how seamless the region is moving in its focus on customer.

Number one, look at what the new tools have done. With NTTA system leveraging and where we go with CDAs and the Texas Mobility Fund and the Trans-Texas Corridor, the region thinks it can leverage $16.8 billion of new money. Let me convert that for you. That would be a 5 cent gasoline tax for 100 years, to give you some perspective of just what we bring in our partnership in this particular plan.

The problem with that, of course, is a 5 cent gasoline tax over 100 years would bring in $150 million a year to Dallas-Fort Worth, and Commissioner, you talked earlier about inflation. We have $16.8 billion worth of projects ready to go today, inflation on those projects is $800 million a year, so this is like a drifting sailboat. Even if you were to get a 5 cent gasoline tax of $150 million a year, you can't catch up with a sailboat that's drifting at $800 million a year which is why this RTC is pounding their fist on the table daily that up-front monies and some revenue streams to beat this inflation element is the only way we're going to be able to expedite these particular projects.

Two, the Texas Mobility Fund. We're again here to thank you. You're permitting us to use rail components as part of the Texas Mobility Fund. The region is focusing on seamless connections at our airports with those monies, and you will see, starting in this year, engineering and construction of seamless connections at both Love Field and at DFW Airport as we move forward. Again, the theme of seamlessness.

Third, the biggest change, one that's not always talked about, both in our region and across the state is where we're moving on public transportation coordination. We're implementing dozens of strategies within the region, we have a one place sign-up for taxicabs being moved ahead in partnership with Dallas-Fort Worth and DFW Airport.

It will create a safety valve for anyone disabled or elderly that needs to get to medical attention within the region and it will provide a service where we don't have public transit yet within the region, and this is being repeated in 25 other areas across the state.

The fourth is you heard the presentation from the transit agencies on the sales tax exemption and how it's important to connect these passenger rail investments, as Ms. Koop talked about, with new land use and sustainable development initiatives, and don't try to solve all your transportation in these urban regions on the back of transportation, but try to do it in new partnerships working with city governments on land use and in-filled development, sustainable development and transit-oriented development around rail stations.

The fifth is our partnership with the North Texas Tollway Authority. In September we sent over five rail projects to them, we anticipate hearing any day with regard to that. We would love to announce at a press conference on NTTA moving ahead on those particular toll road projects as quickly as possible so those communities who call me daily will have information on how their transportation facilities can be expedited using system leveraging that the NTTA has before them.

Six, you heard from the three rail agencies where they have a new seamless arrangement of sharing their tracks and having integrated fare systems and having integrated information systems so a person can travel from any part of the region to any other part of the region, even in areas that don't yet have rail service, creating the opportunity to expand the roles and responsibilities of these three agencies seamlessly in the rest of the region.

You heard the accomplishment on aviation and the Wright Amendment that has occurred and how we're bringing agreements with regard to seamless aviation travel and the connection of that to the ground transportation elements. As was alluded by Mayor Trevino, we need transportation in Dallas-Fort Worth because we are the largest metropolitan region in the United States that does not have access to a seaport, and these critical intermodal linkages are critical.

And finally, we signed the memorandum of understanding between the MPO and you, the commission, with regard to how we move forward and integrate transportation projects.

I end with if you read Martin Luther King's letter from the Birmingham jail -- and we haven't been yet placed in jail but sometimes over the last month or so I feel that -- Martin Luther King talks about two types of people. He was a young pastor, went to Birmingham, Alabama; he was questioned on why he was there.

He said people that don't know better should be held to an easier standard because they just don't know, but people who do know, like the local pastors who were critical of him coming to that particular region creating change, the people in this room need to be held to a higher standard.

And we hope this type of communication is how we are all held to a higher standard to be able to defend the policies and actions that we implement in this case with regard to transportation, and I very much appreciate the opportunity for you to meet and continue to partner with our transportation officials within the region.

Thank you very much.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Anything else, members? Any more dialogue, any more questions?

MR. HOUGHTON: One question, Mike. The $58.6 billion shortfall, is that pre or post 121?

MR. MORRIS: That's post 121.

MR. WILLIAMSON: My goodness.

MS. ANDRADE: I have, I guess, a final comment, and I just want to thank you all, and I tell you, every time I listen to your presentation, I'm always impressed, and you certainly have been the leader in this state and you continue to be one for your vision, for working together. You're such a large Metropolex and yet you're able to work together and I just admire that so much.

But also, I want you to remember that you were the leader in us sitting together like this with future delegations, we hope, and so thank you so much and I salute you. My hat's off to you, and look forward to working with you.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Michael, can we get a bunch of these?

MR. MORRIS: We have two boxes, I think, Mr. Chairman, we're going to leave behind.

MR. WILLIAMSON: I think the commission might want to send this across the street and say this is sort of where we've been headed the last six years and it's working in North Texas, and you know, when you've got a plan, you've got a strategy, you know what to do.

MR. HOUGHTON: Not just across the street but maybe to hometowns.

MR. WILLIAMSON: Maybe so.

We want to thank each of you who sat at the table today and it's not easy to be on a camera and act like it's not there and talk about policy things, but we also want to thank all the participants that create the RTC mentality, and I particularly am thankful for Judge Horn and Judge Self, along with the other judges in the region who have been so active in kind of sticking your necks out there with us and saying we've got a plan that will work. It's very gratifying to see that.

I look forward to the day that the Dallas County Judge, I understand he's very interested in transportation and wishes to become more involved in where we're headed, and I look forward to the day that we can all sit together as well. And it goes without saying that although the judge is not here, we appreciate his contribution also.

Michael, thank you very much.

We're going to adjourn -- not adjourn -- we're going to stand at ease for about ten minutes to give everybody a chance to clear out and get ready for the next round.

(Whereupon, a brief recess was taken.)

MR. GERIK: I know you've got a busy schedule today and we'll go quickly through the presentation, but I've got a few people I'd like to introduce, if you don't mind.

First, with us today to my right is an insurance representative from State Farm, as well as Lieutenant Jason Hartgraves from Dallas County. Also we have some staff members from ATPA. To my right is Susan Sampson who is our director; Charles Caldwell, our grant administrator; and Anna Mallett, to my right, who is going to be working the PC during the presentation, our public affairs coordinator.

Also, we have a couple of our task forces. You'll hear us refer to grantees and task force; we have a couple of those here today. We've got Tommy Hansen with the Galveston County Task Force. He is also the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators president, currently serving as president. We also have Janet Rogers from the Tarrant County Auto Theft Task Force.

What we'd like to do today, all of you probably are familiar with ATPA. If you're not, this is kind of an education, hopefully, to maybe to bring you a little bit more aware of what ATPA is and what we do.

As Mike said, we do have a separate board so we're a little bit different than a lot of the different divisions of TxDOT, and we thought it would be a worthwhile project to maybe take you through quickly what we do and how we operate from that perspective.

To get started, we thought we better start at kind of square one, and I'd like for Susan to come up and talk to you a little bit about some of the statistics involved in automobile theft and that will kind of get you the history of where we got started and why we got started. Susan.

MS. SAMPSON: Thank you, Mike. Good morning. I'm Susan Sampson with the Auto Theft Prevention Authority. And I'd also like to recognize Rebecca Davio is here, and we are within the Vehicle Title and Registration Division, and thank you, Rebecca for everything that she does for us.

One thing that I want to tell you real quickly because this is pretty exciting, do you know when Americans really fell in love with vehicles? 1907 when Henry Ford's Model T rolled off the gangplank and that's when all of your jobs began, the roads.

And also, it was because of law enforcement that we have registering and titling. In 1927 they decided that we had to mark these vehicles because they were getting stolen because there were so many. So if we really need to talk to somebody about our problems, we might talk to old Henry Ford.

Now, did you know that a vehicle is stolen in the United States every 25 seconds? If a business of stealing vehicles were legalized and incorporated, auto theft would rank in the top 250 Fortune 500 companies. Vehicle theft is the costliest property crime in the United States, costing consumers more than $8 billion annually.

Vehicle theft is a gateway crime that can lead to kidnapping, identity theft, title and insurance fraud, drug smuggling, terrorism, and even murder.

Auto theft and narcotics trafficking are considered the two most profitable criminal enterprises and that stealing a vehicle's identity can net upwards of $30,000.

It doesn't matter, I hate to tell you, whether your vehicle is old or new. I know sometimes you hear people say well my old car, I just wish they'd steal it. Well, if it's stolen, that can bring more than two to three times the value of that vehicle.

Thirty percent of all vehicle claims are fraudulent and account for 10 cents of every premium dollar consumers pay for insurance.

Now let's go to Texas. From 1991 to 2005, over a million vehicles were stolen in Texas. Today we average a vehicle theft every five minutes. In 2005, thieves made off with almost 93,000 vehicles, valued at over $700 million. Only California leads Texas in the number of vehicles stolen.

Most cars are stolen -- and I hate to say this, Commissioner Holmes -- in Houston than in any other Texas city, over 20,000 annually, followed by -- this is one time Dallas can be first -- Dallas, then San Antonio, Fort Worth, and El Paso.

And at this time, I'd like for Mike to come back up and he's going to give you an overview of ATPA and our board.

MR. GERIK: Obviously from the statistics, ladies and gentlemen, it's obvious why we got started. From the standpoint in 1991 when the Texas Legislature created the Automobile Theft Prevention Authority, I think there was obviously a problem and something needed to be done and that was the purpose of which we got started.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about the authority and kind of how we work, that process we go through and from the standpoint of how we're funded and how our board is made up because there's some similarities, and I think that's why we're under TxDOT is because of some of those similarities.

First of all, as far as ATPA, we fund programs and public education initiatives designed to reduce vehicle theft in Texas. Obviously, we're about reducing vehicle theft, we work with law enforcement officials, local prosecutors, insurance industry representatives, and citizens across Texas to combat vehicle theft, and I'll tell you how we do that by virtue of some of the committees that we have.

Obviously, one of the big areas of vehicle theft is along our Texas-Mexico border, and we have special committee that works with that and we also have a task force down there to try to reduce the theft along the Texas-Mexico border. How we fund it, a lot of you may not realize but when you get your auto insurance policy you may see a 50 cent or $1 charge, depending on whether or not you have a six-month or an annual policy.

That's where that money goes, to the Texas Automobile Theft Prevention Authority. It is collected by the insurance companies, the insurance companies are just basically a collection source, they take the money and then they send it to the Comptroller of Public Accounts here in Texas in Austin, and then from that it's appropriated to the Automobile Theft Prevention Authority. And as you all know, the legislative process, just because you collect so much, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get that much going back to your authority.

But that's how the funds come into the authority, and what do we once we get the funds. Well, first of all, we have a board, you've had several of them introduced to you, but I wanted you to be aware of how our board is made up. We have actually six members, all appointed by the governor, just like yourselves. Two of them are insurance company representatives, two of them are law enforcement representatives, and then two of them are consumer representatives.

The law enforcement representatives are Chief Carlos Garcia, he's from Brownsville; the other one I introduced to you earlier, is Lieutenant Jason Hartgraves from Dallas County. The two insurance company representatives are myself, as well as Richard Watson. And then our consumer representatives are Denise Saenz from El Paso, as well as Cindy Davison from El Paso as well.

Also, we have an ex officio member from the Texas Department of Public Safety, and he wasn't able to be with us today, but Kent Mayer who is in criminal law enforcement from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

That kind of makes up our board. We meet four or five times a year and discuss issues, just like yourselves, not as routinely as you guys do. I was surprised, in talking to Mike, that you meet once a month. It seems like you probably get through with a meeting and you're ready to start another one. I applaud you for what you do.

Secondly, obviously we work as a board, but we get a lot of input, and we have three committees that basically is the focus of the ATPA as far as telling us and giving us advice on what we need to do. The first one is our Border Solutions Committee. It is one of the biggest issues that we deal with along the Texas-Mexico border. Some of their initiatives and communications and relationships deal with Mexican law enforcement training as well as border partners programs and also auto theft relating to terrorism.

The second committee is our Insurance Fraud Committee, and we actually have representatives from insurance companies, Office of Attorney General, as well as the Texas Department of Insurance and law enforcement. And we work together to identify goals and initiatives to address insurance fraud and auto trends here in the state of Texas.

And the last one is probably the heart and soul of our authority and that's the Grantee Advisory Committee. And the Grantee Advisory Committee are the ones that are actually getting the funding from the authority, they're the ones that make up our task forces, and they're the ones that are actually implementing the programs to combat theft here in the state of Texas.

They basically serve as the voice of the grantees. If they have any issues and problems, we get together on this committee and we try to work them out, then bring them forth to the board for action. They consider matters of concern from both ATPA and grantees. They capitalize on the knowledge and experience of law enforcement and they also develop initiatives to reduce auto theft.

Because the Grantee Advisory Committee is the focus or is really the purpose of how we get our job done, I'd like Susan to come up one more time and talk to you a little bit more in detail about the Grantee Advisory Committee, because I think if you understand what the grantees and the task forces are doing on a daily basis, you'll understand the authority. Susan.

MS. SAMPSON: Thank you, Mike.

We're going to go directly into our grants, and you will see, as this map comes up, we have 31 grants statewide, and the grantees in the red, that's their home base, that's their office in those cities, and then the grantee home areas also are in the yellow, and then we have the coverage areas. Many of our grants are what we call multi-jurisdictional.

We were talking this morning on the regional mobility fund, and here we have the similar thing here. For instance, Tarrant County, there are six other counties and agencies that they have interlocals with and they work with our grant in Tarrant County.

There are many things that are very exciting about our task forces, and these are just a few of the pictures, but 80 percent of our grantees are law enforcement. We also have a crime prevention grant in Arlington with the COG. We have a grant in El Paso with the tax office on title fraud issues.

We have a grant with the Criminal Justice Division which is called FujiNet which we are able to download, our task forces are, and see where all the parolees are that were convicted from auto theft, and many of them are in auto parts shops and stores working, so it's a great program that we have.

And I'd like to go into our 15 years which is how long we've been going, and I've been with this organization for 14 years, so I have kind of grown up in auto theft and really enjoy it