Planning Tools to Assess the Real Estate Leveraging Potential for Roadways and Transit: Technical Report (0-6538-1)

A funding crisis exists for financing much needed transportation infrastructure projects across the nation and Texas is no exception. Texas has responded to the crisis by passing several bills allowing innovative financing and alternative options for project financing. Among these is Senate Bill 1266 (SB1266), which is a landmark legislation and was passed in 2007 as part of the 80th Legislature to provide the legal backdrop for the creation of the Transportation Reinvestment Zone (TRZ) to facilitate value capture of the tax increment from a future transportation project. This research aimed to provide various mechanisms to augment the implementation and understanding of SB1266 provisions across the state of Texas including but not limited to documenting the current understanding and knowledge of the legislative provisions, compilation of actual implementation case examples, development of standardized methods for screening, TRZ development and revenue assessments, and also presents the results of a workshop held to augment the understanding of TRZ for highway projects. An additional section of this research explores the implications of SB1266 for transit finance and discusses this aspect within the larger context for innovative finance of all transit infrastructure both those on the state highway systems and off. Finally, specific recommendations to the legal framework are made in the light of specific objectives of the research both for highways and transit in regard to the use of increment based finance.