Ted Houghton is one of five members of the Texas Transportation Commission, which oversees the Texas Department of Transportation. [Editor's note: The previous sentence was changed on Aug. 5, 2008) to correct the number of TxDOT commissioners.]

On July 21, Houghton and El Paso business leaders, along with Mayor John Cook, unveiled a $1 billion plan to start highway projects around El Paso in the next three years. [plan]

"The plan calls for local contributions of $216 million in coming years through tolled highways and the diversion of city and possibly county tax dollars from future development along a completed Loop 375," reported Newspaper Tree's David Crowder on July 22. [story]

It was approved by the El Paso City Council July 22. [story]

The plan still must formally be approved by the Texas Transportation Commission at its Aug. 26 meeting in Austin.

Houghton spoke to Newspaper Tree about how the plan was developed, the future of transportation and transportation funding, and the importance of leadership in key positions in making large-scale projects come to fruition.

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NPT: A billion dollars seems like a great number, it's very catchy, kind of a stick-in-your-mind number. What was the process that went into developing that plan?

Houghton: It's nothing magical. I had instructed our TxDOT staff, here in El Paso (and) the Austin leadership, to finish the loop in this town. And if there is a resonating message that rings in my ear all the time, I've heard 'We don’t have a loop.' We're the only major city that doesn’t have a loop.

NPT: Major city in Texas?

Houghton: In Texas. Everyone indexes us to Texas. So … we don’t have a loop and that seems to have been a battle cry for years and years and years. Let's go finish the loop. So how do we do that? The leadership in Austin used their state resources on some individuals who are pretty savvy; from the Tyler district, from the San Antonio district, from the Dallas district, from the Fort Worth district of TxDOT and the Austin folks come out here and find a way to put to mesh this all together.

NPT: What does that mean, mesh this together? The technical way, the political way?

Houghton: No, there are no politics involved. It's the dollars that are allocated to El Paso and what I call the low-hanging fruit. The low hanging fruit was Loop 375.

In the Lower Valley, North Loop expansion, tremendous growth down there.

On the West Side, Canutillo High School, Community College, and that new mall have created a lot of traffic. I think it's Talbot Road fixing that issue, that and the toll roads.

And the UTEP project, we get cars that are queued up on the interstate stopped coming around a blind corner. We're going to kill some people some day.

I said to the staff, 'What is it going to take to get us to focus on that project?' We got a new nursing school going up where the tennis courts are, we got a new parking garage, so all the resources, the assets are being built right next to the freeway. We got population growth at UTEP now beyond 20,000 students, and they go by the interstate highway.

So you know you've got this project here at the interstate. It's a big project because you're going to take Schuster over to create another route to UTEP. Folks coming from the east can go up the Border Highway can get off at Santa Fe and come up Paisano and come over at Schuster. And they can come from the Upper Valley the same way instead of Interstate Highway 10.

In other words, you have to create other corridors other than I-10, and I call I-10 Main Street El Paso. It's become your Main Street. It really has.

NPT: Talking a little more about the folks from other places, Tyler etc, what role did they have?

Houghton: They helped our district.

NPT: How did they help? Is it brain power, were there a bunch of plans that needed to be done more quickly?

Houghton: It was just how do you support and use other brain power. You have your TxDOT districts and they become, with no disrespect, little empires, and they don’t ask 'What are you doing in San Antonio to make this better? How can we make El Paso better?' And what brought this all to fruition was we have money coming into TxDOT to Fund 6. That's your transportation fund, but not enough money to do everything. And with the infighting that we have had around here for several years, we have built no new projects in three years.

NPT: Except for the Inner Loop.

Houghton: That's right, and that was done by us, by Gov. (Rick) Perry, (former Transportation Commission Chairman) Ric Williamson and myself. That was new money that came in. Gov. Perry made a promise to the United States military, saying 'If you come, we will build it.'

NPT: So why all of a sudden release that much money? Just because they felt like they owe us?

Houghton: Well, we had a commissioner. With all due respect, it's nice to have leadership on boards, whether it's UT (University of Texas), whether it's Parks and Wildlife, whether it's Texas Tech.

We have had two regents (at Texas Tech) in Robert Brown and Rick Francis … and they highlight the importance of the medical school in El Paso. You're competing for resources and you have to state your case, but you have to have people in positions of leadership to get a lot of these things done.

You can't just sit by and say we're a poor community and we deserve it. There are a lot of poor communities in this state that have gotten involved and have gotten transportation assets and other types of assets just by getting into positions of leadership.

NPT: This (billion-dollar plan) appears to be a generation's worth of projects in one shot, so is there a precedent for this large of an investment?

Houghton: Let me put it in perspective. We have 12 categories at TxDOT. Category 2 relates to the eight major metros. Our allocation for Category 2 dollars is $24 million a year (for) new stuff. The Inner Loop alone was $367 million.

Do the math. That's 15 years of allocation.

So we have $367 (million) on top of what we were already doing. And it's a new interstate. A brand new interstate from (Loop) 375 to (US) 54. You'll be able to zip along. It'll be elevated above Fred Wilson, and you'll have all these big fancy direct connects and flies.

NPT: As an aside, that makes the Airport even more of a player than it was already.

Houghton: It does unbelievable things for the property values out there. You can now take the trucks off Airport Road and Airway. The city can go out and say 'Look, trucks are banned from those roads they now have to go via the Inner Loop to either US 54 and catch I-10 or go north on 54 or go east and catch Loop 375 down to I-10 and go east on I-10.'

It will absolutely change the traffic patterns in that region in a very positive way.

NPT: What if there is a food store there and the truck needs to deliver?

Houghton: (Trucks) that are destined for warehouses are what I'm talking about. Local traffic, sure, you got to have that. You got to have deliveries.

So let me go back to the funding. You got $367 (million), and that was not even anticipated by this region. I told (TxDOT District director) Chuck Berry to plan for building the entire thing, not the $50 million plan that they had, and that was a two-way road from Loop 375 to the airport. They only had $36 million in the bank to build that road, of the $50 million. We layered in 10 times the amount of money to build that road.

NPT: So going back to the first part of the question, the precedent, you're talking about $367 million, here we have a billion in projects wrapped into one package, is there a precedent for that?

Houghton: Other districts in the state have been a little bit more forward thinking and have had their projects ready to go.

The money doesn’t sit in a bank account waiting for you. It's being used across the state. It's being used elsewhere.

NPT: So there is precedent for the scope of projects over time. But as a package?

Houghton: What I told El Paso and delivered to the MPO and in our April commission meeting, we said 'Cities like El Paso, Austin and Fort Worth would have first shot if they got plans in before the fiscal year, which is Sept. 1.' Well they're just going to make it. Aug. 26 is when we'll vote on it as a commission the plan that has been forwarded on to us.

The reasoning is, we had, we're going to reallocate, reshuffle the deck on money, and we're going to take out 2014 to 2019, and put El Paso back into this mix again throughout the state so all the money that they had left on the table and hadn’t used was going to get reshuffled over this period of time. So what that meant was over a basically 10-year period you were going to get your projects but they were going to be less because of the CPI, inflation. A dollar today over here is not worth a dollar down here. So you're going to get reshuffled in this deck, you're still going to get projects in dollars but you're going to get less because of the inflation costs that are killing us in TxDOT.

So we said look guys … 'We'll let you have first shot at this if you come with a comprehensive plan.' So I instructed our staff in Austin, 'Help El Paso figure out, and here's the key, the loop needs to be finished.' We have the right of way all there, we've got construction basically. You been to Northeast lately, the center? Go look at it. It's all there. You just got the access roads and then a big huge wide very long stretch of dirt that's been sitting there for 20 years.

NPT: Does it get a little tricky in some of the places? For example, you mentioned North Loop, maybe some of the places in the valley that are more heavily populated, do you have rights-of-way even there?

Houghton: Now, there we don’t have the rights-of-way. We're going to have to go acquire right of way.

NPT: How about Downtown, the little jog between the Border Highway and Paisano?

Houghton: Well, you're going to have to go over the train yard.

NPT: Or if the trains move?

Houghton: That would be a beautiful thing, if it all works out in the timing. And hopefully it will. If the Santa Fe decided they want to move out there, which I'm all for, I'll raise my hand.

NPT: There being Santa Teresa or the East Side?

Houghton: Santa Teresa. They can't go to the East Side. It doesn’t work for them.

NPT: What prompted this conversation was the column where I called this the status quo. And I heard from a lot of people wondering exactly what I meant by that. We've been building roads for 100 years now, and the clear winners are the people who own property around those roads and the contractors who build those roads.

Houghton: I can't help that. I mean that is where the rights-of-way are, that's where Loop 375 is. You got two lanes on Loop 375 here. You want to go move it somewhere? You can't. We don’t have the loop. Continually, I keep hearing the barrage we don’t have a loop around the city.

NPT: Why is the loop so important? Not every city has a loop.

Houghton: Sure they do. In Texas? Yeah, they do.

NPT: In Texas, right. Of course, you said we're comparing to that.

Houghton: We index ourselves to Texas.

NPT: And it's an economic development tool, transportation.

Houghton: Generally is. When you build the asset, things build right up to the fenceline.

NPT: Do we have an option of using any of this money for mass transit?

Houghton: No, under federal law.

NPT: And is the money already there and committed to? And how about the potential maintenance cost? (Nationally) we drove 40 billion fewer miles than in the first four months of last year.

Houghton: Not in Texas.

NPT: Not in Texas? We're going to keep driving here?

Houghton: I don’t know but our numbers are up.

NPT: So you're confident that the taxes we get from the gas sales and from other means those projections are sound?

Houghton: No, I'm not confident. I'm confident only because we're seeing population growth in Texas zoom. They bring cars, they pay taxes. So your hedge right now is population growth in Texas. That's your hedge against driving less.

The census, we're going to have redistribution in 2010. Right now the projections are Texas will pick up four congressional seats. That is roughly 3 million new people in the state between 2000-2010. There is going to be a redistribution of 10 (nationally). We're going to be 40 percent of 10. No other state is getting multiple. California is getting zero, they're flat. Florida is getting one, I think Mississippi is getting one. Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, they're losing, they're dropping.

So my point is it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out as you have more cars you get more tax. That’s the good news. The bad news is you have more cars on the road, more congestion, so we have to build more.

NPT: Have we ever built our way out of congestion?

Houghton: No. Look at that great example of Los Angeles; they have never built their way out of congestion.

NPT: Although I have to admit this. I've spent some time in the Los Angeles area recently and some of the toll roads are fairly easy to get around on.

Houghton: Yeah, but they haven’t build their way out of congestion. They made the decision right around 30-35 years ago, to build more roads, more concrete, instead of building rail.

NPT: And if you go back 30 years before that, Los Angeles had one of the better local transit systems within their city core, which they took out in favor of buses. In fact El Paso did too.

Houghton: You know who were the culprits in that deal? The oil and automotive companies.

To promote the internal combustion engine they pulled up these things, they bought these companies, they bought these transit lines and shut them down. That was the competition; now here we are again.

NPT: But with all due respect you're one of the decision-makers.

Houghton: The problem I have is that the funds are dedicated to concrete and steel in the ground. Not rail. Roads.

NPT: What can you do?

Houghton: It's federal. Federal dollars mandated in Fund 6. Constitutionally dedicated. We can have a constitutional election in Texas to change the state gas tax. I have to have a federal mandate to change the federal allocation. And you got to remember, our state dollars chase federal dollars. It's called a matching. So if I build this I get the match. So we're always chasing those federal dollars. So where it stops and starts is right here at the federal level. It's going to have to be a big huge paradigm shift to something different.

NPT: What can you do and what can the El Paso community do?

Houghton: Well we advocate to our delegation, which we're doing right now, that the highway trust fund is broke. I mean it's going to go $4 billion in the hole beginning fiscal year Sept. 1. There's a bill before Congress now just to get it back to where we get some money out of it until there is a permanent fix in the next administration, whoever that may be. And it's a daunting deal. Where are you going to get the revenue to replenish the highway trust fund that our gas taxes, that our federal dollars, have paid into?

Tell me where the revenue comes from? Gasoline? Vehicle miles traveled?

We're going to have to wean ourselves from the tax to charge per vehicle mile traveled. That means you have a little transponder in your car on how many miles you travel and when you fill up at the pump you pay for the actual miles you've traveled.

There's a demonstration project in Oregon.

I think that's coming. That's one of the proposals. So that will in fact start getting people to think, "Ok, we now have to start thinking differently.'

We have to unleash the highway trust fund to allow El Paso to chart its own destiny. That it's just not roads you build with federal dollars, it's whatever this region determines it wants to build. And that's what it is now, constitutionally dedicated funds to build concrete.

NPT: And what does that obligate us to? What does the billion in construction cost obligate us to long-term maintenance fees?

Houghton: It's horrible … well, the toll road will pay for itself. Embedded in the toll is maintaining that asset, so your gas tax does not maintain that asset. The other assets … will be maintained out of gas tax.

NPT: So it might seem foolish to in the short term turn down a huge amount of transportation funds that would do a lot of things for the community in terms of economic development, but it sounds like you're describing a scenario where in the long term we might be better off if we say we're not going to take this billion dollars now but when it comes available in the future …

Houghton: You won't have it available in the future. What makes you think it's going to be there?

When you talk about a billion dollars, you don’t walk over a billion to say maybe down here there's something else.

NPT: What about the other options we potentially could have had?

Houghton: What else would you recommend?

NPT: Well, I don’t know. That's my question. For example, would widening sections of I-10 make sense, or take Mesa, if Mesa is a state highway, maybe while we can't buy buses we can do everything that goes into preparing Mesa for a rail line or for a high speed bus line, or the same on Montana, or elsewhere.

Houghton: Well, that's what we did, we found $25 million to start your bus rapid transit on Mesa Street.

NPT: Yeah, but as a percentage of a billion …

Houghton: I can't use Fund 6 dedicated funds on buses.

NPT: Understood it has to go to concrete, but even within that, for example, you mentioned the interchange at UTEP. Maybe all the interchanges on I-10 need to be fixed.

Houghton: How does that get you new mobility?

NPT: That's the conventional wisdom, we need "new mobility."

Houghton: You're coming in as a Monday morning quarterback instead of attending the MPO meetings and seeing all of this planning going on.

NPT: But at the end it seems like the plan we get is not a creative solution. It's just the conventional wisdom that we need new mobility, when maybe we just need to fix the choke points on the highway.

Houghton: I think we need it all. You need new mobility, new avenues. That avenue right out there interstate 10 is your only east-west, except Mesa which ties in Montana, what else do you have?