Toll Road Monster
We already know there’s an audit of the Harris County toll road spending on temporary workers, but we found another smelly deal at the toll road and it’s time for someone to put an end to this nonsense and a leash on this TOLL ROAD MONSTER.
You’re watching an epic battle… King Kong… Godzilla….
Monsters that have been with us for more than 60 years.
Speaking of monsters…
Over the last ten years, the Harris County Toll Road Authority has amassed a profit of 3.5 billion dollars.
But instead of paying off the roads and making them free…
Our five million EZ Tags have become just another way to tax us forever…
Like the never-ending battle of our favorite monsters.
“There’s a pretty good chance people are getting ripped off. But we don’t even know because we can’t audit the fund,” said Texas Senator Paul Bettencourt.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the toll booth operators are gone.
Cameras now watch our every move electronically.
The first all-electronic tollway in the country was the West Park Tollway… But if you thought getting rid of all that payroll would make tolls cheaper…
Take a look at this…
It is an invoice for more than $681,000… The payroll part was $467,000… for temporary workers for two weeks.
It represents the billing for just two weeks of work by the toll roads’ biggest contractor: Electronic Transaction Consultants.
Harris County has been good for ETC… since 2012 they have been paid $200 million.
They have been given a sole source contract… Meaning no one else can supposedly do what they do.
This fee schedule shows we are paying as much as $195 an hour for ETC managers… That is equivalent to a salary of $400,000 a year.
But we found one staffer making $287.50 cents per hour… That’s an annual salary of a half million dollars…
In one month ETC billed taxpayers more than forty-four thousand dollars for that one woman.
“Pay attention drivers. The state is transitioning away from TxTag… Tolling and billing services will be handled by the Harris County Toll Road Authority instead,” announces a TV news story.
We’ve been looking at years of Electronic Transaction Consulting invoices. And we notice that toll road officials rarely question a single penny of these staggeringly large invoices.
But we did find this e-mail in March of 2020…from HCTRA’s assistant director David Patterson.
Questioning one manager who had billed 215 hours of work in 22 days.
That’s almost 10 hours a day… Every day… I just find it hard to believe.
Patterson also complained about the number of ETC employees billing toll road customers for meetings.
There are usually several ETC folks that sit on the call and aren’t contributing to the meeting…
That was during Covid… Fewer people were out driving. What the toll road official called a time of famine.
“I’d hope to see fewer people on these calls and use those hours for more productive work”
We found no evidence the invoice was changed.
We looked at this invoice two years later. September of 2022. 10 percent of the billing time was for meetings…Tens of thousands of dollars.
We are mostly focused on 2022… that’s when the Toll Road Authority amended its contract with ETC…
ETC was now going to provide customer service call center operators under the same no bid contract,
Contracts over $50,000 are supposed to be bid out for the best value for taxpayers…
But this staffing contract was worth five million dollars. The toll road circumvented state purchasing laws. There was no competition for companies making money from your tolls.
Harris County already had a contract for the folks who answer the customer service phones at HCTRA paying about $18 an hour…
But look at the monies we are paying to chase source and a company called employment and training centers… Up to 39 dollars per hour for the same job.
Andrea: “Did you get paid $38 an hour?”
Cheryl Gerhart: “No. I got paid $15 an hour.”
We talked to some of those temporary employees and discovered… these companies are making a shocking 100 to a 150 percent markup…
The toll road claims it has no documents explaining why the contract was changed, who authorized paying millions more than we had to for temporary workers.
And why aren’t Harris County commissioners asking these same questions?
The head of purchasing told us months ago another staffing contract at toll road was mishandled and would be rebid. But when? It’s been months… our money is a wasting.
“Well, I’d like to thank Wayne for investigating Harris County Toll Road Authority.”
Oscar Slotboom is an independent software consultant who’s been doing deep dives into Houston Highway management for a quarter of a century.
“You know, we as people who pay the toll rates, need to know where these high tolls we are paying are being used,” he argued.
Oscar’s recent articles in the Houston Strategies Blogspot credits our work and he has a warning.
This monster could gobble up our money for decades to come….
It’s another tax in a county that is already raising taxes substantially.
“As soon as all the bonds are retired or taken care of in a trust fund, the roads will become part of the State highway system. But here’s the thing. As long as HCTRA has any debt they can charge, any toll rate they want,” he explained.
HCTRA’s debt will continue for decades.
It’s planning to add more than 3 billion dollars of borrowing starting this year…
Moody’s, the bond rating agency, gives HCTRA a high score card because of annual rate toll increases.
“Moody’s document expects HCTRA will start to need to increase toll rates in order to maintain their credit rating,” added Slotboom.
Increases of at least 2% per year.
But wait… HCTRA collects more money than it needs now.
“What I think I’m very concerned about with HCTRA is that they’ve got $369 million of excess toll road revenues.
State Senator Paul Bettencourt says the so-called excess revenue is being siphoned off to Harris County for uses that have no oversight.
More than 1.4 billion dollars has been diverted to Harris County just in the past 4 years.
There’s really no audit path at all from either the state or the county auditor. One of the problems is that you’ve got an unincorporated area of the county that’s not getting a lot of that money.
The city of Houston isn’t getting that money either…
Think about the millions of people who pay the tolls on a daily basis and get no benefit from toll road excess revenues.
And it looks like this toll road slush fund is forcing the toll road to actually borrow more money because it’s been diverted.
“What? Okay. Now, look, they’ve got enough operating funds,” declared Bettencourt.
Look at this. In 2022 and 2023 HCTRA issued “commercial paper” for a combined 350 million… at a borrowing rate of 10%…
That’s like getting a cash advance from your credit card.
That cash advance will cost taxpayers 26 million dollars in interest!
“You’ve got cash flow. So why are you borrowing on the future. This all sounds preposterous and bad public policy at a minimum”.
According to Moody’s… another great thing about HCTRA is:
“The new implementation of cashless tolling makes annual toll rate increases easier.”
Oh goody.
We have ETC to thank for that.
Look at this invoice. It’s $860,000. For just two weeks on work.
I thought new technology was supposed to make things cheaper.
“They can do what they want. They’re exploiting loopholes. They can hire contracts on the sole source basis and no one’s there to stop them or to provide any oversight in the public interest,” asserted Slotboom.
“It’s a tax and it has to be accounted for,” stated Bettencourt.
Expect the toll road to face tough questions at the State Capitol.
“Look, there’s going to be bills filed on this. There’s a lot of questions about these expenditures. And we’re going to hear about it up in the legislative session.”
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