Plans for Texas' First Private Toll Road Roll On -- and Right Over People in its Path

Mark Graham

Texas Turnpike Corp.'s Neal Barker says the company has been transparent in its dealings with property owners affected by its plans for a toll road.

Brenda Short and her husband purchased 32 acres in a rural, unincorporated section of Hunt County in August 2012, trading the convenience of their old home in Rockwall for the chance to raise their kids on the peaceful country property, surrounded by lots of land.

Their home is in the country, yet not too far from her husband's job in Greenville or their church. It was at church six months later that Short heard about the toll road, through a friend who just read the local newspapers.

Short did the research herself and found that Neal Barker was going around to city councils stretching from northeast Dallas County to Hunt County, pitching them on the toll road and getting some to pass resolutions supporting it. "I think it will help us because anytime you have a new thoroughfare come through, you have restaurants, businesses that come with it," says Keith Koop, the mayor of Josephine. His City Council passed a resolution supporting the toll road after the Texas Turnpike Corp. promised to back off from an earlier route proposal that would have divided Josephine's downtown in two, he says.

Most of the other councils had the same reaction as Lavon: The plan was too vague to warrant approval yet. "We'd like to be able to tie the sort of spaghetti lines on the map to some properties and to some real locations on the ground," says Rick Crowley, the city manager of Rockwall, the suburb east of Lake Ray Hubbard that has also refused to support the project.

The only thing that seemed sure about the tollway's path is that it would run parallel to I-30. And Brenda Short knew in that case her property would be in the way. Barker's presentations at the time said that the toll road would be within the right-of-way of an abandoned railroad, what was once the Cotton Belt rail line. To save the line from being taken over by a private developer in 1995, Texas formed a new government agency called the Northeast Texas Rural Rail Transportation District, or NETEX, to oversee it, protecting the government's right-of-way in the area for potential future train routes. Instead, however, the NETEX board agreed to lease the area to the Texas Turnpike Corp. in 2011.

Short, a former computer software engineer, knew that a part of the NETEX right-of-way ran through her land. So she studied and struggled to make sense of the layers of transportation bureaucracy in Texas, figuring out why roads get built and who decides where they go. She learned about the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the government agency tasked with the powerful job of divvying up federal transportation dollars. For urban planning enthusiasts in Dallas, NCTCOG's unelected transportation director Michael Morris has recently become a frustrating symbol of suburbia and unhealthy sprawl, for his refusal to take seriously the idea of tearing down I-345 in downtown Dallas and his insistence that the controversial Trinity toll road get built between the levees near downtown Dallas.

Out where Short lives, Morris would soon become notorious for almost opposite reasons: his embrace of a private toll road that seemed to benefit commuters going from Dallas to Hunt County at the expense of all the rural people in the middle. "We bought that land for a reason," Short says. "We were trying to get rid of big roads."

Short began sending newsletters out to other people who lived along the NETEX right-of-way and formed a website called NoTollRoad.com to post news clips, documents and information about upcoming government meetings.

Calls and emails came in immediately from others who lived on what they thought would remain undisturbed acres of land for years. "Nobody had any idea about it," Short says. "I couldn't find one person who already knew about the plan for the road."

Short came with other opponents to speak at county commissioners court meetings, where Hunt County Judge John Horn has been supportive of the road for providing his constituents with another fast route to Dallas. In Horn's meetings, "we were called conspiracy theorists and fear-mongerers," Short says.

In March 2013 Short and the toll road opponents finally had a breakthrough. At a Council of Governments meeting, Morris acknowledged the large public outcry and an-nounced that his agency would slow down and study whether the toll road idea was even necessary.

If NCTCOG found the toll road was feasible, then it would go in the region's Mobility 2035 plan. From there, an agency called the Regional Transportation Council, the transportation planning body within the NCTCOG made up of lawmakers across the region, gets to vote on whether or not to approve the mobility plan. The extra time hasn't been much, but Short has taken advantage of it to organize more opponents of the project, building her NoTollRoad Facebook page to 1,000 fans and balancing updates with homeschooling her kids. In the meantime, the NETEX announced that it would save the right-of-way for possible public transit use later on, and the corporation moved its proposed study area off the right-of-way, in an alignment that's still uncertain but that appears to be at least a few miles from Short's land.

Even though her property appears to be safe from being cut in half by a toll road, she keeps at the activism. "When a private company comes in and says we want to build a road for our private profit, and we're going to do it on the backs of your private property, I don't agree with that, whether it's going through my yard or not," she explains.

In September of this year, Morris said he finally had the results of his agency's feasibility study ready. The Council of Governments scheduled a meeting to announce the results in a joint meeting with the Texas Turnpike Corp., making it clear to opponents like Short where the regional transportation agency's loyalty was.

In early October, The Dallas Morning News published a March 2013 email that NCTCOG senior program manager Tom Shelton sent Texas Turnpike's John Crew, assuring him that NCTCOG's feasibility study would probably work out in the company's favor: "We want to craft the language referencing the project that creates the least amount of risk for you," Shelton wrote.

The lawmakers who sit on the Regional Transportation Council, chaired by Dallas County Commissioner Mike Cantrell, come from all over the region and haven't offered their opinion on the project. At an RTC meeting on October 9, Morris' pitch promoting the tollway went unchallenged by the RTC board.

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