Houston area forums are commenting this week on a story in last week’s Chronicle about the HC Toll Road Authority spending $1 million dollars to have banks study what to do with the Authority. I was under the impression that that was what we paid the Authority itself to do, but clearly, they are not paid enough, if it requires a cool million to figure these things out.

The county agreed today to pay investment banks $1 million to study the toll road system, including a plan to privatize it.

Commissioners Court voted to study three possible scenarios for the Harris County Toll Road Authority: keeping the 83-mile system as is; selling it outright; and leasing the long-term rights to operate it.

Commissioners Court is expected to name JP Morgan Securities to lead the study of an outright sale.

Goldman Sachs & Co. will head the study of a long-term lease. Citigroup will look at keeping the toll road as is.

I have often argued that term limits cause a mentality of “worry about today and let tomorrow take care of itself” among our elected officials. Clearly, I forgot the older cause of that problem: campaign contributions. The toll road has served its purpose (transferring our tax dollars to contractors), but now it can be milked for even more contributions by putting it up for sale.

Never mind the fact that the beltway is essentially unfinished, with a vast gap along the northeast side suffering from increasing traffic, bottlenecked at red-lights leading to an increasing number of subdivisions. Now the politicians have visions of $$$ signs pouring into their campaign coffers, and the usual phony studies are being ginned up to over-hype excesssively optomistic amounts of money to be made (“billions!” they already say) by selling off public assets. HC citizens should be used to this by now. It’s been SOP since before the Authority’s predecessor came up with how much could be made off a toll bridge over the ship channel, then tried to blame their losses on the shutting of a single plant in Pasadena.

Of course, I don’t quite understand “public sector math,” despite my job in that self-same sector. It’s high level math, don’t you know: 2200 vehicles per day (their estimate of the impact) at $1 per trip (the toll back then), two trips per day ($4400) for 365 days per year works out to $1,606,000 a year or about half-again the amount being paid for the studies. Clearly, this caused the huge losses the (then state) Authority incurred, before they doubled the toll and refinanced the debt.

Now that I think about it, wasn’t the original toll $0.75, instead of $1.00?

Oh well. One wonders just how introducing a profit motive into the toll road’s operations is going to improve matters, but clearly, it’s one of those high-level public sector math things.