"Private investors built it, and they did not come."
Get real about Camino
February 27, 2006
Ben Wear
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 2006
File this quote along with "It'll never fly, Wilbur" in the pantheon of sentiments best left unexpressed.
Dennis Nixon, president of one of the banks that backed the Camino Colombia private toll road near Laredo, told The Wall Street Journal several years ago that getting the project approved was "like stars meeting in heaven."
Come to think of it, Nixon was kinda right. One assumes that when two stars meet, there's a huge explosion, and everything gets wiped out. That's pretty much what happened with the $88 million, 22.6-mile road connecting Interstate 35 to the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge northwest of Laredo.
Private investors built it, and they did not come. Or at least not nearly enough theys — cars, trucks — to pay back the money borrowed for construction.
The two-lane road closed in February 2004, about a month after a bank bought it from investors on the Webb County Courthouse steps for $12 million. The bank then quickly sold it to the Texas Department of Transportation for $20 million.
It's been open for business again since September 2004 under the state's shingle, with truck tolls cut in half to $8 and the car charge reduced from $3 to $2, and traffic is building slowly.
But for several reasons, the toll road is attracting nowhere near the numbers that Mr. Nixon and its other backers predicted during the road's formative stages.
The road's original owners said it needed about 1,500 trucks and 300 cars a day to break even. Since the state took over, the road has averaged 430 vehicles a day, most of them cars.
The road's sad history has been picked up by toll road opponents here and across the state and used as a cautionary tale about what would happen with other private toll roads. Such as the Trans-Texas Corridor twin to I-35, right now likely to be run by the Spanish toll road operator Cintra and its Texas partner, Zachry Construction Corp.
But Camino Colombia's genesis, tangled up in Mexican and Laredo politics, is unique, making such comparisons, at best, suspect.
The road, first of all, was built to connect to a bridge over the Rio Grande put in the middle of nowhere, about 24 miles upstream from Laredo, mostly because Mexico's president in the late 1980s was from the state of Nuevo León and wanted it to have its own connection to the United States. Nuevo León has a gerrymandered, 10-mile-wide peninsula of territory linking it to the border.
In the initial years after the bridge opened in 1991, you could get from Laredo to it only via two-lane FM 1472, known locally as Mines Road.
But with trucks stacked up in Laredo waiting to get over the two bridges there, Carlos Benavides III, part of a powerful Laredo family, figured that a toll road shortcut to the new bridge from I-35 well north of town would work.
Gov. Ann Richards' administration (egged on by some Laredo leaders who opposed the toll road) wasn't so sure, and her appointees to the Texas Transportation Commission wouldn't give the Benavides group permission to build it.
So the road idea languished.
Meanwhile, Richards showed up in Laredo to announce that a fourth bridge, much closer to downtown Laredo, would be built. That bridge opened in 2000 and is connected to I-35 by a short and very nice — and very free — stretch of Texas 20.
And Mines Road, the free route to the Solidarity Bridge paralleling the river, was upgraded to four lanes.
That's a whole lot of incentive not to take the toll road. Or build one.
But with some of Gov. George W. Bush's appointees on the Transportation Commission, Camino Colombia was approved in 1996 on a 2-1 vote and opened for business in 2000.
Financial heartbreak, as detailed previously, ensued.
So now the state, which bought it with gas tax money and thus has no debt to pay back, is bringing in about $600,000 a year. That money, state officials say, will be used on other transportation projects in the Laredo area.
Traffic on the road for December and January was about a third higher than the comparable months a year earlier.
How come? Well, Danny Magee, director of transportation operations for the state Transportation Department's Laredo district, says the working theory is that the violence between rival drug gangs in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, is encouraging some folks to go out of their way to Camino Colombia.
Let's see: Pay a $2 toll, or get hit by a stray bullet? Sounds like a bargain and a novel new justification for toll roads.
Anyway, you have to be pretty creative to look at all that and see a doppelganger for TTC-35.
That proposed road's competition is I-35, which, as we all know, is congested and dangerous between San Antonio and Hillsboro and sure to get more so.
And although a private company will build and run TTC-35, private investors didn't conceive the thing. Government did. And Cintra, unlike the toll road neophytes involved down south, runs roads all over Europe.
Will the initial estimates for TTC-35 traffic be wrong? Absolutely. Anyone predicting the near and long-term future is guaranteed to miss the mark, either low or high.
Traffic might even be so low that the road will default. It's happened elsewhere in the United States, as well. But all three toll roads in Houston and the two in Dallas are veritable money machines, and there are innumerable turnpikes across the country doing quite well.
There are a lot of legitimate talking points in the continuing debate about the Trans-Texas Corridor and toll roads in general. Camino Colombia, tempting as it is to toll road opponents, probably isn't one of them.
Getting There appears Mondays. For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.
© 2005 Austin American-Statesman: www.statesman.com
February 27, 2006
Ben Wear
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 2006
File this quote along with "It'll never fly, Wilbur" in the pantheon of sentiments best left unexpressed.
Dennis Nixon, president of one of the banks that backed the Camino Colombia private toll road near Laredo, told The Wall Street Journal several years ago that getting the project approved was "like stars meeting in heaven."
Come to think of it, Nixon was kinda right. One assumes that when two stars meet, there's a huge explosion, and everything gets wiped out. That's pretty much what happened with the $88 million, 22.6-mile road connecting Interstate 35 to the Colombia-Solidarity Bridge northwest of Laredo.
Private investors built it, and they did not come. Or at least not nearly enough theys — cars, trucks — to pay back the money borrowed for construction.
The two-lane road closed in February 2004, about a month after a bank bought it from investors on the Webb County Courthouse steps for $12 million. The bank then quickly sold it to the Texas Department of Transportation for $20 million.
It's been open for business again since September 2004 under the state's shingle, with truck tolls cut in half to $8 and the car charge reduced from $3 to $2, and traffic is building slowly.
But for several reasons, the toll road is attracting nowhere near the numbers that Mr. Nixon and its other backers predicted during the road's formative stages.
The road's original owners said it needed about 1,500 trucks and 300 cars a day to break even. Since the state took over, the road has averaged 430 vehicles a day, most of them cars.
The road's sad history has been picked up by toll road opponents here and across the state and used as a cautionary tale about what would happen with other private toll roads. Such as the Trans-Texas Corridor twin to I-35, right now likely to be run by the Spanish toll road operator Cintra and its Texas partner, Zachry Construction Corp.
But Camino Colombia's genesis, tangled up in Mexican and Laredo politics, is unique, making such comparisons, at best, suspect.
The road, first of all, was built to connect to a bridge over the Rio Grande put in the middle of nowhere, about 24 miles upstream from Laredo, mostly because Mexico's president in the late 1980s was from the state of Nuevo León and wanted it to have its own connection to the United States. Nuevo León has a gerrymandered, 10-mile-wide peninsula of territory linking it to the border.
In the initial years after the bridge opened in 1991, you could get from Laredo to it only via two-lane FM 1472, known locally as Mines Road.
But with trucks stacked up in Laredo waiting to get over the two bridges there, Carlos Benavides III, part of a powerful Laredo family, figured that a toll road shortcut to the new bridge from I-35 well north of town would work.
Gov. Ann Richards' administration (egged on by some Laredo leaders who opposed the toll road) wasn't so sure, and her appointees to the Texas Transportation Commission wouldn't give the Benavides group permission to build it.
So the road idea languished.
Meanwhile, Richards showed up in Laredo to announce that a fourth bridge, much closer to downtown Laredo, would be built. That bridge opened in 2000 and is connected to I-35 by a short and very nice — and very free — stretch of Texas 20.
And Mines Road, the free route to the Solidarity Bridge paralleling the river, was upgraded to four lanes.
That's a whole lot of incentive not to take the toll road. Or build one.
But with some of Gov. George W. Bush's appointees on the Transportation Commission, Camino Colombia was approved in 1996 on a 2-1 vote and opened for business in 2000.
Financial heartbreak, as detailed previously, ensued.
So now the state, which bought it with gas tax money and thus has no debt to pay back, is bringing in about $600,000 a year. That money, state officials say, will be used on other transportation projects in the Laredo area.
Traffic on the road for December and January was about a third higher than the comparable months a year earlier.
How come? Well, Danny Magee, director of transportation operations for the state Transportation Department's Laredo district, says the working theory is that the violence between rival drug gangs in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, is encouraging some folks to go out of their way to Camino Colombia.
Let's see: Pay a $2 toll, or get hit by a stray bullet? Sounds like a bargain and a novel new justification for toll roads.
Anyway, you have to be pretty creative to look at all that and see a doppelganger for TTC-35.
That proposed road's competition is I-35, which, as we all know, is congested and dangerous between San Antonio and Hillsboro and sure to get more so.
And although a private company will build and run TTC-35, private investors didn't conceive the thing. Government did. And Cintra, unlike the toll road neophytes involved down south, runs roads all over Europe.
Will the initial estimates for TTC-35 traffic be wrong? Absolutely. Anyone predicting the near and long-term future is guaranteed to miss the mark, either low or high.
Traffic might even be so low that the road will default. It's happened elsewhere in the United States, as well. But all three toll roads in Houston and the two in Dallas are veritable money machines, and there are innumerable turnpikes across the country doing quite well.
There are a lot of legitimate talking points in the continuing debate about the Trans-Texas Corridor and toll roads in general. Camino Colombia, tempting as it is to toll road opponents, probably isn't one of them.
Getting There appears Mondays. For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.
© 2005 Austin American-Statesman:
posted by Porkus Maximus Tex: at Monday, February 27, 2006
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