New Year, Same Terrible Toll
Harris County Commissioners are being asked to approve a new staffing proposal for the toll road monster. This deal smells as bad as the last one.
New Year, Same Terrible Toll
You were tricked all right, but we gave Harris County taxpayers a treat back on Halloween 2024, we showed you how the toll road was ripping you off.
“You don’t want to talk to the people who pay the tolls and your salary. Really? You don’t want to talk to the people that pay your salary?” Wayne Dolcefino said.
How toll road boss Roberto Trevino, the guy you are paying $485,000 a year to run the toll road couldn’t explain it.
“I don’t have that number off the top of my head,” Trevino said.
After hearing Trevino’s embarrassing testimony at the State Capitol last year, I know why he didn’t even know how much cash the toll road had.
“I don’t know the exact number, I don’t know what that sheet is,” Trevino said.
State lawmakers had watched our investigation unfold.
“I think it’s shocking, you have a system that really has no accountability, that’s what’s really wrong here,” Paul Bettencourt said.
“We had dug in to the extraordinary amount of money being paid for temporary government workers in Harris County government. Staffing companies provide the workers, we don’t have to pay their benefits, it’s supposed to be cheaper. Yeah,” Dolcefino told the camera.
It’s big bucks, in less than three years 141 million dollars worth of temporary workers in Harris County government.
Including the eighteen dollars an hour the county was paying staffing companies for these folks.
“I can assist you with going over all your transactions and all of that.”
Call operators who take your call at the toll road.
“And that is where I smelled that smell, the odor of government waste,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Even though Harris County had a countywide staffing contract already, the toll road bosses wanted its own staffing contract, to pay more competitive wages they claimed.
But after asking for the lowest prices, the county decided to ignore price.
The purchasing department showed us a video of one of the losing vendors complaining, and boy was it a waning we all needed to hear.
“Our price that we were able to compare using the open records request was anywhere from ten to fifty percent lower than the awarded vendors,” Stephen Santrach said.
The toll road agreed to pay more than 25 dollars an hour for folks that used to get 18.
“Wait, it got worse,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Enter Electronic Transaction Consultants, the company with a sole source contract to automate the toll roads.
That’s why we don’t need toll booth operators anymore.
Since 2021 Electronic Transaction Consultants has been paid almost 100 million dollars, 20 more millions of your money since the last time we told you about this.
“We never could find out why two staffing companies got some special deal. They were able to charge a lot more for the workers than they provided, no bid, no competition. Boy, it stunk,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Want bilingual? You got to pay more. And a company called Employment and Training Centers, ETC was being paid up to 39 dollars an hour to provide call center operators.
ETC has made 16 million from the county.
Chase Source, they were getting a piece of the action too.
They had made more than 8 million.
“When we saw the multi million dollar bills we start calling some of those high paid folks. Turned out they were getting screwed too,” Dolcefino told the camera.
We calculated toll road users were paying twenty dollars per employee per hour more than they needs to.
The county auditor agreed with our major findings, said he was telling the DA too.
The purchasing department promised to rebid the contracts.
“Purchasing needs to tighten up” they admitted.
But emails showed they eventually blew it off.
“In late November I complained to the new purchasing director, a few weeks later the county issued the invitation for staff companies to bid again,” Dolcefino told the camera.
“It’s about time,” Briscoe Cain said.
We shared the news with Briscoe Cain, the state lawmaker who called the staffing scandal a real insult to taxpayers when we first exposed it.
“Harris County’s finally put out a bid for the staffing contract after wasting more than a year and millions of dollars. But here’s the problem they’re letting the same companies that ripped off the toll road users bid on the contract again,” Cain said.
“We have plenty of questions too for a year the toll road has refused to let us see wo gets free EZ Tag passes. But those high-priced media relations folks at the toll road won’t talk to me,” Dolcefino told the camera.
Guess they are too busy driving around making expensive TV commercials.
“Look guys, we all know about the toll roads, we don’t need to spend anymore money advertising that you can pay a toll,” Dolcefino told the camera.
The bid doesn’t say how staffing companies will be evaluated, how much will price factor in that ought to be the biggest single factor of all staffing contracts.
“Haven’t we wasted enough money?” Dolcefino told the camera.
But why should the toll road care, in 2024 we paid close to nine hundred million dollars in tolls, so much money the toll road has a surplus, hundreds of millions.
Money sent to Harris County Commissioners to fund all their pet road projects.
“We call it buying silence, why no one seems to looks under the hood. Or ask questions like, why aren’t we using every penny of surplus funds to pay off the roads?” Dolcefino told the camera.
“We were told that tolls would go away once the roads were paid off. Instead Democrats running Harris County turned into a forever tax and a real cash cow for Houston politicians,” Cain said.
Texas lawmakers threatened a state audit of HCTRA after our stories. It didn’t happen as part of a deal to give the City of Houston some of the absurd toll road toll surplus.
Reimbursements for first responders making accident scenes on the toll road.
“We need an independent audit of this monitor. Here’s just one little example why,” Dolcefino told the camera.
An email confirming even toll road bosses knew the staffing invoices smelled almost five years ago.
One temporary manager at HCTRA billed 215 hours of work in 22 days.
“I just find it hard to believe.”
“No kidding,” Dolcefino told the camera.
“It’s time to put the toll road authorities spending under a microscope and give voters the say in how that money gets spent,” Cain said.
“I call it a slush fund. Okay, it’s not a us, right?” Dolcefino said.
I told Texas senators last year what I think, it’s time to let Harris County voters go to the pools to decide the future of the toll road, now that we’ve been played for a few decades.
If we don’t do that, buckle up, tolls forever, a giant separate tax added to our increasing property tax barrel.
“And why should folks who pay for toll roads be responsible for fixing roads that aren’t toll roads, is that fair?” Dolcefino told the camera.
“I will tell you if you ask nine out of ten people who voted for that toll road deal back then, they thought that we pay off the darn roads and then they would be free, and if you had a vote today there would be none of this nonsense,” Dolcefino said.
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