What’s your land doing under our toll road? by @BloggersRUs

What’s your land doing under our toll road?

by Tom Sullivan

Welcome to Hollywood! What's your dream? Sadly, there's no hooker with a heart of gold to melt the cold hearts of corporate raiders stripping America for parts. (Where's Julia Roberts when you really need her?) But some people are, however, finally seeing the vultures for who they really are. Take the Trans-Texas Corridor, for example [emphasis mine]:

The TTC, a proposed 4,000-mile toll road, rail and utility project, died a death of a thousand cuts in 2010. First proposed as a much-needed infrastructure investment, the well-intentioned project grew into a monstrosity of politically connected contractors, private property concerns and conspiracy theories. The biggest blow to TTC was statewide opposition to granting Spanish-owned developer Cintra a 50-year, multibillion-dollar deal to control and collect tolls on a concrete corridor bisecting the very heart of Texas. The plan even proposed turning over to Cintra land seized by eminent domain, where the company could franchize roadside amenities like hotels and rest stops to supplement its collected fees.

This degree of private control over infrastructure raised the spectre of a highway built more to benefit contractors than Texas communities. The toll road could bypass towns and exits could be designed to feed contractor-owned fast food joints instead of local restaurants.

Kelo v. City of New London. How quickly we forget.

Now, I'm sure you could find Texans in 2003 who missed the joke in asking what our oil was doing under Iraq's sand. It feels a little different, doesn't it, when a foreign conglomerate asks Texans what their land is doing under its proposed toll road?

But that's not what the article in the Houston Chronicle is really about. It's about net neutrality and another kind of toll road. Here come the free marketeers again, for whom "competition" is just another gimmicky buzzword used to dazzle the rubes:

These companies also want to prohibit cities from building their own online freeways that could compete with private cyber toll roads. Texans didn't tolerate a toll road system that would have discouraged cities from building competing public roads and shut out Cintra. But roads can be more obvious than wires.

Nineteen states - including Texas - already have succumbed to telecom lobbying and erected restrictive legal roadblocks that prevent communities from building and running their own broadband networks. In fact, San Antonio sits atop a publicly owned, superfast fiber optic network, but state law prohibits the city from selling access. It is as if the city built a road, but it could be traveled only by city-owned vehicles and everyone else was forced to take a private toll road.

With the limited options in broadband carriers there's "more monopoly than market." Yet both of Texas' free-enterprizin' senators, Cruz and Cornyn, and Governor Goodhair (Don't you miss Molly?) back the telecoms and oppose net neutrality.

BTW: Cintra is the same firm North Carolina just signed a 50-year contract with – at Senator-elect Thom Tillis' urging – to build toll lanes north of Charlotte. Two other Cintra toll projects in San Antonio and Indiana failed recently, potentially leaving taxpayers holding the bag. But who's counting?