ANALYSIS: A shot across the bow

David Crossley, May 01, 07.

Tagged with transportation, environment, transportation policy council, public input, harris county toll road authority, h-gac

Last Friday, our region's Transportation Policy Council disallowed time for public input to a resolution to approve a massive road-building deal between Harris County and the State of Texas that will set land use policy and development patterns in the Houston area for 50-100 years.

Two agencies, Harris County Toll Road Association (HCTRA) and Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), have agreed that Harris County will put some $20 billion dollars of toll revenues into fast tracking and building most of the major highways TxDOT has wanted to build, but which have never been funded, and then some. This includes the 170-mile Grand Parkway intended to raise property values and induce new sub-urban development in the remaining greenfields in Harris County, most of Montgomery County, and large portions of the other counties ringing Harris. The roads and new sub-urban development would replace forests, prairie, savannah, wetlands, river bottomlands, marshes, and estuaries - splitting almost every ecosystem in the region.

Both the Citizens' Transportation Coalition and the Gulf Coast Institute asked the Council for 30 days to study, analyze, discuss, and comment on the resolution. The Gulf Coast Institute has been conducting study groups around the 2035 Regional Transportation Plan, which is due to be approved this summer, and this new scheme appears to essentially negate that long-range plan, which is largely based on citizen input. The Institute asked for some time so that the 40 or so green organizations in the study group could look at it, because of the devastating effect it appears it would have on land use.

It is not clear why there was such urgency about getting this resolution on Friday's agenda just before the meeting and without prior notice, or why some normally sympathetic Policy Council members were not open to the notion of citizens asking for time to study it. The members of the Policy Council, who are mostly elected officials, including two from Houston City Council, decided not to allow such public scrutiny and unanimously approved the resolution as is. The first question that should be on everybody's minds is what the extent of public input will be on all these road projects, and this opening vote is not a good sign.

Further, the last major Harris County project, the Westpark Tollway, appeared to catch many citizens by surprise. I've been told that the Houston-Galveston Area Council, which is in charge of regional transportation planning (particularly as it relates to "regionally significant projects" like the Tollway), didn't learn that the project would go forward until a block or so of it was actually under construction. I have never found anyone who is aware of any public outreach about that toll road, but I have found a lot of surprised people who lived in its neighborhoods. That doesn't mean there wasn't any public outreach, it just means that process isn't common knowledge (nor does a Google search yield anything), which begs the question how public it was, if it happened at all.

The Harris County/TxDOT plan is in almost direct opposition to the proposed 2035 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), which in its draft form calls for exciting new ideas and a smart new approach to access and mobility. The RTP is coming forward soon for public comment, and then for passage by the Policy Council. The underlying ideas in the RTP arose from a large public process conducted by H-GAC to determine the vision and values of the citizens of the region. That citizen view continues to emerge in the direction of "green Houston," toward much more transit, more "livable communities," and less road-building.

We are at a critical moment in this region where people who want a higher quality of life are beginning to say so and to make demands of public officials With this new plan, Harris County has thrown down the gauntlet on the side of Much More at the expense of Quality of Life.

In this space, we will continue to explore all the transportation plans as they go forward and to try to put them all in context. But to discuss these two divergent views of Houston's future - Quality vs More - we have established a new blog called GreenCity.

Links:

Harris County/State of Texas joint agreement
H-GAC Background document
H-GAC Resolution
Map of projects
Project list and costs
Chronicle account of the plan

2035 Regional Transportation Plan
Envision Houston Region report
2035 RTP Executive Summary Draft
2035 RTP Draft
Appendix B: 2035 RTP System Analysis Draft

Next David Crossley post: "Quality of life vs. more, part 2"
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