Tricks Of The Toll Road

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It’s spooky season again! Two Texas lawmakers are calling on the Harris County Toll Road Authority to scrap a new staffing contract that could cost the people who pay the tolls 50 million bucks over the next 5 years. During this Halloween season, we’re calling it THE DIRTY TRICKS OF THE TOLL ROAD!


We’ve uncovered quite the trick this Halloween season… The trick the Harris County Toll Road Authority is playing on us all…

“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 who pay your salary?” Wayne Dolcefino confronts HCTRA Executive Director Roberto Treviño.

From the beginning… Harris County toll roads were the ultimate bait and switch… Instead of making toll roads free after we paid them off, we created a real monster.

We are now paying 896 million dollars in tolls in a single year.

“A toll is a tax, a toll is a fee, a fee is a tax, a tax is a fee, this is all revenue money going into the county…” says State Senator Paul Bettencourt.

The profit over the last decade for the government agency is just over 3.5 billion dollars.

And HCTRA’s latest news… They want more of course.

The toll booths are all empty now… And the toll road relies on outside staffing companies to fill a lot of the jobs… The amount of money being paid is stunning… The auditor says it’s 141 million dollars in less than three years… Even they were shocked at the amount.

“It’s supposed to be cheaper than having full-time government employees… No pensions, no lucrative government benefits, no taxes… Makes a lot of sense… The staffing companies providing these temporary workers make their money by charging more per hour for those workers”, says Wayne Dolcefino.

But we had to file a criminal complaint against HCTRA officials to get records involving one of these staffing companies… To see how much we are paying bilingual workers to cater to the small percentage of folks who don’t speak English…

Employment and training centers appear to be charging the toll road more than fifty percent above what the workers are actually getting paid… Workers… A profit margin virtually unheard of in government staffing contracts.

They work for a company called ETC (Employment and Training Centers), which has also fought to keep its pricing a secret from you… In just four months the Latina-run company has been paid nearly a million dollars…

Irma Gonzales is listed as president; her husband Roberto is listed as vice president… He’s a former vice chairman of the Harris County Housing Authority Board… The company ignored our phone calls.

It is a symptom of a much bigger problem in Harris County… And it’s a rare moment when I actually agree, as much as I hate to say it, with County Judge Lina Hidalgo.

An audit this year showed the toll road was one of the places that had sloppy purchasing practices.

“We need to send all of this mess to the purchasing department and independent purchasing department and take it out of these offices,” states Hidalgo during a press conference.

Oh… I agree with her about something else. That it was absurd to give Roberto Treviño… the guy running the toll road… A huge pay raise to 485,000 dollars a year.

“It feels insanely icky… No one is so good they deserve a 40 percent salary increase overnight. I hope you guys are ashamed…” said Lina Hidalgo in a County meeting in January.

“Why do you think you’re worth so much money?” Wayne asks Roberto Treviño.

We filed a criminal complaint to get public records released out of the toll road. They ignored our requests to talk to the boss… So you know us, we went and found him.

Wayne: “Mr. Treviño, I’m Wayne Dolcefino. How come you are hiding records from us?”

Treviño: “We have given you all the information you asked for, Wayne, what you do with that is beyond our control.”

Wayne: “But why didn’t you give it to me when I asked for it?”

We are supposed to find vendors who give taxpayers the best value… And two years ago that’s what Harris County with a master contract for outside workers based primarily on price. Including customer service reps for the toll road… Available for as low as 18 dollars.

ETC lost out on that master contract, but someone must have wanted them to get in on the gravy train… Because they were hired as a subcontractor instead… Guess relationships matter.

E-mails show that one single department at the toll road wanted to pick its own vendors to work with.

Look at this email: “Tolling ops is the group that literally keeps the lights on here at HCTRA, and the relationship that group has with the vendors will be vital.”

“Why not fifty? Or seventy-five percent? or ninety? The cost to folks to pay the tolls should be priority number one but it’s clearly not,” says Wayne Dolcefino.

“And if you’ve got a 75 percent non-economic bid versus 25 percent is what it actually costs you that’s bass backward. It’s upside down. They shouldn’t be doing it. This is how legislation gets started,” explains Bettencourt.

The new HCTRA staffing contract will likely cost fifty million dollars over five years… And it was done with the help of the county purchasing department…

And it was approved by the Harris County Commissioners Court in April… in total secrecy.  They didn’t disclose who won… what they were charging taxpayers.

An internal investigation is underway and here’s part of the reason why… Look at the scoring sheets of potential vendors for this staffing contract.

See the scores for pricing that is supposed to make up twenty-five percent of the score. They are all dashes… regardless of the prices offered by the 38 vendors vying for the business. No one even factored in price. And the finger pointing has begun…

“I believe what HCTRA is trying to do is put the blame solely on purchasing,” reads an e-mail from Purchasing Agent Corey T. Douglas in September 2024.

A top County Purchasing Official tried to convince us we were wrong…

Wayne: “You’ve got no issue with I take it with asking people to submit prices and then not considering the prices in the first place”.

“That is not… that is a false statement,” responded Juanita Patterson, Assistant Purchasing Agent.

But we have internal emails now proving that’s exactly what happened…

“Do you care about the price of these staffing employees? Does price not matter to you guys? Does price not matter? Don’t you think you should talk to all the people paying the tolls? Why price was only 25 percent of your staffing contracts? Is it so you can give it to someone you like?” asks Wayne without receiving any response from Roberto Treviño.

Some of the county’s serving staffing companies lost out on this toll road contract. Like A-1 and Open Work… Even though they had lower prices. In some cases, a lot lower.

Among the vendors chosen this time ETC… who is still fighting our request to even see their proposal like it’s some kind of secret.

Open Work declined our request for an on-camera interview. But we know what they told County officials… Because the County recorded the meeting and we got it under state law.

“We didn’t have the information we needed to protest because it was all kept confidential,” stated Stephen Santrach in a September meeting.

The videotape documents the potential savings HCTRA ignored even though they are spending $200,000 a week on outside workers.

“Our pricing that we were able to compare using the open records request was anywhere from ten to fifty percent lower than the awarded vendors”, continues Santrach.

On a 10-million-dollar contract value that would have represented Harris County savings of over 2 million dollars.

“Ignoring the price of these toll road proposals is a direct insult to the people paying the freight,” said Texas State Representative Briscoe Cain.

Instead of finding the staffing company with the best-priced workers with your money. HCTRA and County Purchasing Agents later decided on a minimum and maximum they would pay for a certain worker…

“The range you provided was so large I can drive a Mack truck through that range. Literally, you’re talking for some positions 60 percent difference in pricing”, claimed Santrach.

Take those folks reviewing license plate images for 14 dollars an hour… The toll road was willing to pay more than 37 dollars an hour.

“So, you’re saying the Harris County toll road authority is totally fine paying an extra 550 for that position,” affirmed Santrach.

Sure they are. Because this is a cash cow…

You remember the price for toll road reps in the county’s master contract… compare it to what ETC is charging now. 40 percent more…

Wayne: “Do you have a problem with the way they did it?”

 Juanita Patterson: “I can’t answer that”.

“I’m a guy who paid extra to sit in gridlock Westpark tollway every morning for a dozen years,” says Wayne Dolcefino. “These toll road stories really piss me off.”

The HCTRA employees who scored this contract said they had no conflicts, but none of the vendors were asked to submit a form like this one, from the Texas Ethics Commission, a conflict-of-interest questionnaire. Our questions may change that.

“I don’t know what to tell you we don’t have a form. But this is making us want to have a form,” stated Juanita Patterson.

We know some of the winning vendors turned in blank forms instead of disclosing their top officials… And related companies.

And we can question the depth of the county’s research into the vendors’ qualifications…

Toll road vendors are required to give 27 percent of their business to minority or women-owned businesses.

BDO was one of the winning bidders. And one of their MWBEs was a company called 7th Echelon, out of Pearland…

Maybe someone should have checked… that company forfeited their right to do business in Texas for not paying taxes last February. Two months before the contracts were handed out.

“The contract needs to be trashed, and the toll road authority start again from scratch”, urges Briscoe Cain.

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