Governor keeps Bugg in TXDOT driver seat

When Gov. Greg Abbott reappointed San Antonio bank chairman and arts patron J. Bruce Bugg Jr. to a six-year term last month as chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission, even Bugg’s political and philosophical opponents hardly blinked.

They object plenty to his roads-only mantra as head of the agency that oversees the Texas Department of Transportation and its $31 billion budget. But both Abbott and Bugg are Republicans, and the primacy of highways goes back decades in Texas.

And they like Bugg personally. In the partisan world of Texas state politics, that’s worth noting.

“I don’t think anyone who knows Bruce Bugg does not think he’s a good public citizen,” said state Rep. Ray Lopez, a San Antonio Democrat. “Obviously, he has been appointed by Abbott and must follow the governor’s directions. I don’t happen to agree with those directions, but that’s the way it works. I don’t

blame Bruce for that.”

Jay Crossley, director of Farm & City, an Austin-based think tank that tackles rural and urban transportation, prefaces a litany of complaints about TXDOT’S policies by saying, “I respect Bruce Bugg, and he is a good public servant.”

“That’s gratifying to hear,” said Bugg, who stepped out of a recent bank meeting to speak by phone. “I’m a big believer in listening to both sides. In this world, we talk over each other too much.”

Abbott first appointed Bugg to the five-person transportation commission in 2015, then made him chairman two years later. Currently there’s one open seat on the commission.

Bugg, the chairman of three Texas bank holding companies and a major supporter of the San Antonio Symphony, also was a senior adviser on economic development to former Republican Gov. Rick Perry from 2012 to 2014.

He calls himself a conservative Republican who voted for Donald Trump for president but adds with a bail-me-out-of-this cackle — “I supported his policies more than his personality traits.”

Bugg praises Abbott on all fronts, but he routinely sidesteps attempts to elicit purely political observations about, for example, the future of Texas politics or the direction of President Joe Biden’s administration. He often reminds critics that neither he nor TXDOT is allowed to lobby the Legislature.

Asked to recall the most controversial issue he has presided over in the transportation post, he took a full 20 seconds to consider it — “You’ve stumped me,” he said — and then named a Corpus Christi harbor bridge project that required a change in design firm. He said the all-republican transportation commission rarely even has a divided vote, much less heated debates on transportation policy.

If faced with complaints that 97 percent of TXDOT’S budget goes to road building, Bugg insists it’s the will of Texas voters who approved overwhelmingly in 2014 and 2015 two propositions amending the state constitution. The measures required several major funding streams “for constructing, maintaining and acquiring rights of way for public roadways other than toll roads.”

Critics such as Crossley say those ballot measures were misleadingly worded and that today’s urban Texans would probably reject any proposal to spend their tax money “only on roads, without an appropriate amount for public transit.”

Lopez credits Bugg with putting major Bexar County highway projects such as the expansion of U.S. 281 to the Comal County line and Loop 1604 from Bandera Road to Interstate 35 “front and center” on the bulging TXDOT priorities list.

Bugg said some $7.7 billion in Bexar County highway projects have been finished or are planned or under construction on his watch.

“Bruce was willing to give us a voice to articulate the congestion problems we have,” Lopez said. “We’ve done lots of very big projects, and that’s a good thing, but if we only talk about roads as the solution, we’ll never get out of this mess.”

Like many of the state’s urban Democrats, Lopez wants TXDOT to fund everything from high occupancy vehicle lanes to light rail and high-speed rail as alternatives to simply widening freeways.

“Privately, Bruce and I have had multiple conversations (about mass transit), but I just don’t think he can promote any strategy beyond what Governor Abbott wants. They’re reluctant even to do HOV lanes,” Lopez said. “They want only single-occupancy lanes, and that’s just not smart.”

Crossley challenges the notion that the vast majority of Texas voters want their tax money going strictly to highways, pointing to a survey done by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research that indicated that about half of Harris County residents want good sidewalks and public transit as much as the other half wanted big suburban houses and wider roads.

“We’re fighting for Texans to have options, and clearly most Texans are not as ridiculous as TXDOT policy,” he said.

Bugg doesn’t bristle at that rhetoric. The problem, he maintains, is that massive amounts of federal transit dollars are tied up in populous Northeast corridors from suburban Virginia to Boston and in California. Both are losing population, and that funding should be reapportioned to states such as Texas, where people are coming for jobs, Bugg said.

Lowering his voice just a bit, he said he plans to meet with the Texas congressional delegation to discuss this option. There is no mention of how Biden, who has been riding Amtrak for decades from his home in Delaware to the Capitol, and California’s even more robust congressional delegation, most of it consisting of Democrats, would embrace a plan that diminishes their funding.

But Bugg offers it as a solution that would force Texas to devote more money to mass transit projects because of congressional mandates. And if greater federal funding ends up being used for passenger rail — perhaps something linking San Antonio to Austin, for rail fans a dream long deferred — it would relieve Republican state leaders of the messy political task of explaining such decisions to their rural and suburban auto-dependent base.

What’s far more likely, say transportation mavens, is that Biden would include new federal passenger rail dollars as part of a stimulus or infrastructure funding plan and not take them away from any state.

Bugg’s hands are tied by the Legislature, explains Ed Emmett, a senior fellow at Rice’s Kinder Institute and a former state lawmaker who knew TXDOT when it was called the Highway Department.

“It always comes back to money,” said Emmett. “When TXDOT was told (by voters) that no money could go to toll roads, that took a lot of the private-public partnerships out of the equ=ation. And the Legislature hasn’t raised the gasoline tax since 1991, so Bruce has to make do.”

That gas tax raised $3.7 billion in 2018, yet per gallon is one of the lowest such levies in the nation.

Bugg is ready to deflect just about any vaguely liberal “new urbanism” argument that suggests TXDOT’S obsession with road building might be bad for Texas.

“How about all those electric vehicles that some people want?” he asked. “Won’t they need roads? I don’t disagree with these voices for transit, but it needs to be ‘all of the above.’”

Crossley and others praise Bugg for making road safety and the reduction of fatalities a defining theme at TXDOT.

In 2019, Texas had more than 10 million fewer people than California, yet it had slightly more traffic deaths and a far worse death rate per miles traveled — 1.25 deaths per million vehicle miles, compared with 1.06, according to U.S. Transportation Department data.

“We’ve advocated that highway safety is even more of a problem than congestion,” Crossley said. “And under Bruce Bugg, TXDOT has essentially done everything we asked for and has adopted the ‘Road to Zero’ program that pledges to reduce road fatalities 50 percent by 2035.”

TXDOT allocated about $300 million a year for two years to support the program, Crossley said.

“That will benefit all our grandchildren,” he said, “and Bruce can say that is part of his legacy.”