Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

What's a legislator to do?

Texans, in a poll on transportation released last week, said they want money for nothing and their toll roads for free. Or words to that effect.

The grandly named Texas Lyceum, a Dallas-based nonprofit leadership group, asked 1,000 Texans about 30 questions on getting around. Should state and local governments spend more on highways, airports, passenger rail (including high-speed connections between metro areas), bus service and (even) ports, Texas Lyceum asked in different questions?

Oh, yes, Texans said, by healthy margins. Give us more of all of that, particularly because, according to 84 percent of those polled, "reducing traffic congestion" is either very important or somewhat important.

OK. Money's a bit tight these days. Should we raise the state's 20-cents-a-gallon gas tax to pay for those things?

Heck no, a thumping 72 percent said.

Well, how about toll roads then? Nope. Even for completely new roads, like Texas 130, 66 percent said they weren't interested. For existing highways, 69 percent said no.

So, to sum up, build us more transportation stuff, all kinds of it (including things like bus service and rail lines that operate at huge losses), but don't charge us for it. This will no doubt be a dose of courage when the Texas Legislature gets together in January and begins to toss around options.

The one thing lawmakers likely will do is fill in the dots on Proposition 12, allowing TxDOT to borrow $5 billion. Under a constitutional amendment voters OK'd in November, the state can issue $5 billion in bonds and repay it with general state revenue.

The state, according to the comptroller, does have several billion dollars of excess revenue to spend. The talk during the interim has been about ending the diversion from TxDOT of about $1.5 billion of gas tax revenue during the state's two-year budget cycle. The idea was that with the overall surplus, that money (or a large chunk of it) could go back to TxDOT and the Legislature could then replace it with general revenue. To borrow that $5 billion (with a 20-year payback) would require about $800 million every two years for debt payments.

So ending the $1.5 billion diversion would allow a $5 billion quick fix, with about $350 million a year left over for other stuff. With federal transportation funding plunging and costs going way up, this would only make a dent. But, hey, its something. And with no new taxes or Spanish-run toll roads.

One problem, though: Most of that $1.5 billion — $1.2 billion, to be precise — goes to operate the Department of Public Safety. You might have heard about a fire in an old state building recently that DPS failed to prevent, at least to some degree, because of short staffing, poor training and broken equipment. DPS will have its own claim for spending.

If you did a poll on that, Texans would no doubt support giving DPS more dough. Just don't tax us to get it.