The Collin County Observer™

Editorial: Tollway agency works to restore confidence

Friday, July 23, 2010
The Dallas Morning News Editorial Board

The North Texas Tollway Authority made the right decision by ignoring high-dollar bait dangled its way to choose a Collin County route for a future stretch of the Dallas North Tollway.

Property owners near the new roadway will make a bundle after it's built, and the city of Celina wanted the super-heated development inside its boundaries. No problem with that. Celina made the novel pledge that NTTA could have the future bounty of the higher property taxes. No problem with creative thinking, except for where it might lead.

Had the NTTA jumped at the money, it might have opened the door to an era of transportation planning by municipal bidding war. Those kinds of cash inducements may be in our future someday as road money dries up, but the rules aren't in place nor the consequences fully thought out yet.

The bigger problem with the proposed Celina route was that it would have further insulted a one-time compact made between Collin and Denton counties to run the future road segment up their common border. The deal was reached in 2005, but Collin County reneged three years later in a snit about dividing toll revenue. Collin County formed its own, rival tollway authority and vowed not to let money get away.

The decisive 7-1 vote by NTTA to honor the county-line route is a statement about regionalism. Just as the region's major highways serve a wide swath of commuters and travelers, the benefits should be measured out fairly as well...

read the rest of this editorial at The Dallas Morning News.....

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The Observer comments:

The Dallas Morning News' Trailblazers Blog has a post, "Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley was honored as County Leader of the Year by Penton's American City and County magazine. He was presented the distinction at the National Association of Counties annual conference in Reno, Nevada."

The post goes on to say that, "Whitley was praised for building consensus on transportation projects and other North Texas issues in a cover story for the magazine's July 2010 issue."

Trailblazers quotes from the magazine article, "Whitley's ability to bring together diverse groups to resolve issues is the hallmark of his leadership style, sorting out the issues, listening to all points of view, yet insisting, in the end, that a solution must be identified and rallied around".

I don't think that Collin County Judge Keith Self was in the running for an award for regionalism.

That's too bad.

Bill