Transportation Summit Won't Salvage Texas

Transportation Summit Won't Salvage Texas

Democratic candidate for the Texas U.S. Senate race, Barbara Ann Radnofsky, called for a debate with transportation summit speaker Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison on the new transportation bill. "Hutchison wrongly claims that a transportation bill loaded with outrageous giveaways outside Texas ‘eliminates super donor state status.' Texans receive about $36 per person in highway benefits, while Alaskans receive about $1,500. It is a scandal that Texas ranks 49th in federal dollars per capita with this bill. According to her own figures, we will receive only 91.3 cents for every dollar we give to the country via federal gas taxes."

Adds Radnofsky, "We've researched her claims from 2001, where she said, ‘We expect to be treated fairly when it comes to federal transportation dollars.' Even then, Senator Hutchison conceded that in 1998 Texas received 91 cents back on every dollar of highway money, making her new bill a whopping increase of three-tenths of one penny."

"Senator Hutchison couldn't persuade anyone to help Texas with this bill. Deficit-causing bills like this favoring Alaska at the expense of Texas are the reason Texans suffer. Texans are donating their federal tax dollars to the rest of the country, while Congress wastes vast sums on uncontrolled spending for such items as a $200 million bridge in Alaska that will serve an island with 50 residents, and a $125 million bridge in Anchorage. That money would better have been spent on a VA hospital south of San Antonio, because there isn't one in South Texas."

"If you're going to bring home the bacon—or in this case, the pork—for goodness's sake, why bring it home to Alask?" said Radnofsky about Hutchison's rubber stamp support for Alaska's transportation initiatives, which included a $1.5 million bus stop, funding conceded as excessive by the city's director of public transportation. Reports indicated that this is 15 to 150 times greater than the cost of a normal facility.

Texas' junior senator, Republican John Cornyn, refused to vote for the bill. "Texas deserves better than a slight improvement over current law. This bill simply continues the pervasive and long standing funding inequity—and I cannot support that inequity," Cornyn said in reference to the bill.

http://www.radnofsky.com/press_release.php?items_id=72