The Lege

The Texas state legislature has been an object of derision as long as I have lived here. I've known a couple of legislators, including a chairman of the House finance committee who was lucky to escape prosecution. The Lege has seldom deserved the scorn heaped on it as much as they deserve it in this session.

I've mentioned before that there are two broad ways of financing the roads I depend on to get to work: general and fuel taxes; and tolls. (There is a third: federal funding; fortunately we have never been foolish enough to rely on it.) This legislature has seen fit to reject any increase in general and fuel taxes, and to freeze construction of toll roads.

I have come to expect, and even approve, this kind of ostrich-like behavior in Austin. The people there have so befouled a once-beautiful nest that ignoring the situation is the only reasonable course. The Lege does not have that luxury: they have not yet trashed the whole state. They can't demand economic growth and high employment without being willing to fund the infrastructure that supports them. (I'm sorry, I said that wrong: Obviously they can; it's just that they are irresponsible to do so.)

The current governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is possibly the only public figure of less reputation than the legislature. This too is well-deserved. He has structured toll-road deals in ways that are opaque and almost certainly not in the interest of Texans. But he's right when he (or his handler) says that roads are infrastructure and that infrastructure must have reliable source of funding. I do not encourage the Lege to listen to the governor in many cases, but in this instance, they should.