The ability of North Texas to build out its road and rail network rests on a house of cards in Austin, with too many members of the Texas House eager to see it collapse.

To make sure that doesn't happen, lawmakers from Dallas-Fort Worth and other urban areas need to stand firm on the right to raise new transportation money through local elections. This region has been working for nearly six years to expand the transit system through local-option funding, and the next few days will bring important progress or another disappointing setback in the Legislature.

Where things stand: To save the local-option plan in the House, Sen. John Carona of Dallas attached it to a gargantuan, contentious bill to overhaul TxDOT. House and Senate negotiators will be trying to work through differences on several fronts, but they are huge.

From a North Texas perspective, it's good to hear Carona's characterization of local-option. "Non-negotiable," he calls it. That means he is listening to community members who have been clamoring for tools to fight traffic congestion in light of impossibly thin funding from Austin.

The Senate plan would let voters in major metro areas raise fuel taxes and fees for specific road and rail projects. Local control, in other words. But rank-and-file House members, rattled by the political implications of looking "tax friendly," hope to jettison the local-option provision from the TxDOT bill. These lawmakers ought to confront the real question: Shouldn't voters have the ability to improve their communities?

Responsible leaders agree that urban Texas is desperate for money to solve traffic problems. State lawmakers don't have the backbone to raise the fuel tax themselves, yet they are fine with the alternative – a widening web of toll roads, never mind the added expense they foist off on everyday people.

These same people ought to have a say.

We expect to see Rep. Linda Harper-Brown of Irving bring constructive leadership to the debate, since she is sure to be in the thick of things. She has been a supporter of voter-approved transit plans, but this one isn't to her liking, since it calls for county votes instead of city votes.

It's not the time for provincial thinking. DART's regional rail network will soon extend to Irving, bringing the city long-awaited economic benefits. This wouldn't be happening if planners had thought narrowly when DART was a mere concept more than 26 years ago.

Likewise, when regional leaders – including this newspaper and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram – began mapping out the next ring of regional rail, the vision was properly ambitious. Building out the new vision would interconnect Irving to far more communities than is possible now.

There's one regrettable irony in this legislative session: Even if lawmakers approve the local-option plan in the TxDOT bill, new voter-approved gas taxes could not be used for rail without a constitutional amendment. But that's not the next obstacle. The next one is getting lawmakers to do their jobs and secure the local-option plan in the TxDOT bill. Then we'll handle the obstacle after that.