Wednesday, August 22, 2007

NTTA - share the love, or at least the tolls

Someone made a great point over on the comments section of Unfair Park regarding our infamous Trinity toll road. The original post is pretty funny. The point the commenter made was that the road is going to cost a bundle and the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) is going to be collecting tolls on the Trinity parkway, built on land given to the NTTA by the city and Dallas gets nothing in return for its land giveaway. Nada. Just a highway in our park.

Of course the whole point of locating the toll road in the floodplain was that the land was free. I guess some folks didn’t think through that this would be a revenue generating asset and that Dallas would not share in that revenue. This is not new information, but it is a good way of looking at it, especially when you’re arguing in front of a bunch of well-heeled Dallasites.

1 comment:

Re:Solutions said...

Same thing seems to happen with the naming rights to ballparks. The cities get nothing for a park that taxpayers put up their hard-earned money to acquire. That's one of the problems with many who work in the government. There's no incentive for them to think through these things and see potential revenue streams. "It's someone else's money."