May
30
Written by:
Andy Hogue
5/30/2009 1:40 PM
In a statement issued Saturday morning about progress in the HB 300 (TxDOT Sunset Bill) conference committee, Sen. John Carona (R-Dallas) claimed there are 77 House members ready to vote "yay" on a sunset bill that includes his Local Option Transportation Plan.
But LSR wonders why, if a majority of votes are already there, is Carona calling for more?
(See Friday's blog post calling into question a petition circulated by HillCo Partners to gage support for the Local Option Plan).
We include Carona's statement below:
"We will have no money to build new roads in less than four years. In spite of public testimony throughout the interim calling for increased funding, efforts to use traditional statewide methods (indexing/raising the gas tax, vehicle registration fees) have been stalled to a full stop.
"Diversion has gotten worse, not better (for example, gas taxes will now be subsidizing volunteer fire departments). We passed local mobility funding via the sales tax out of the Senate last session only to have it stopped short of a vote in the House. Yesterday, in the culmination of two years of intense negotiations, legislators of both political parties joined hundreds of citizens and community leaders on the Capitol steps to call for local option transportation funding.
"The answer to traffic congestion and pollution in our major metro areas comes now as a stranger to the door of the House. Within the House are 77 solid votes or more, and there is only one true way to prove it. Open the doors of the House to this legislation, and LET THE PEOPLE VOTE."