Environment Texas Blog

Earlier today, Environment Texas co-hosted a press conference, jointly with the Citizen's Transportation Coalition, Texans United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), the Sierra Club, Independent Texans, Houston Tomorrow, and TexPIRG, to ask the Texas Department of Transportation to not waste stimulus funds on new toll roads and highways.

Here's a link to the press release.

Here's the statement we delivered at the event:

Our state is going through serious economic and environmental challenges, and a recent poll made by the National Realtors Association and Transportation for America shows that Americans favor government spending in public transportation, walking, and biking options over building new toll roads and highways.

The Texas Department of Transportation has the unique opportunity to allocated billions of stimulus dollars to help our economy and reduce our burden on the environment. We should use this money to put Texans back to work, but we should be careful to spend it in a way that is consistent with Texas’s priorities. TxDOT is trying to rush through bad projects without a proper vetting process with the public.

This economic challenge we are facing illuminates that fact that Texas is at a crossroads on transportation.  If we continue with business as usual - highways and toll roads to nowhere - we will be laying the groundwork for decades of increased global warming pollution and dependence on oil. We should instead choose a different path.  Public transportation and transportation alternatives mean more and better jobs now, as well as less global warming pollution, fewer asthma attacks from air pollution, and lower dependence on oil.

But as we stand here today advocating for a new direction, the road-builders and other polluting interests want to dominate the stimulus funds allocated to Texas. We are calling on the TxDOT and the rest of the new Congress to keep it clean and allocated funding to projects that will make Texas cleaner, safer, and stronger. Thank you.