Petition exceeds 5,000 signatures of Montgomery County residents opposed to Road Bonds

The Woodlands, Texas – “If timing is important in an election, we are right on schedule,” says Gordy Bunch, The Woodlands Township director. “Early voting started yesterday as we exceeded our 5,000th petitioner pledging to vote against the bonds. When you get 5,000 individual citizens who will go online and sign their names to a petition, you have a forceful collective voice to be reckoned with,” says Gordy Bunch, who originated the “Vote NO” change.org campaign against passage of Montgomery County’s $350 million road bonds. Bunch has been joined by the Texas Patriots PAC, the Montgomery County Tea Party, and former state representative Steve Toth, and fellow Township directors Peggy Hausman and John McMullan among others. They are leading thousands of residents from The Woodlands and surrounding areas in Montgomery County, Texas who believe the bonds are poorly planned, financially faulty, and that they primarily serve a majority of special interests from outside Montgomery County, while failing to solve immediate needs in the county’s gridlocked traffic conditions.

Toth says he opposes the bonds because Montgomery County Commissioners failed to first do a countywide study similar to the South Montgomery County Mobility Study, which is a comprehensive plan that reviews mobility needs out to the year 2040. He said that study took two years and cost $500,000, unlike the proposed bond issue composed of separate and unrelated Commissioner “Wish Lists” for the county’s four precincts as recommended by a committee of insiders without traffic experience or even a study for reference. Opponents believe that the bonds are also heavily weighted with excessive and multiple maintenance projects that do not belong in a bond that purports to be a “thoroughfare plan.”

They say another factor which diminishes the value of the bonds is a proposed $22 million extension of Woodlands Parkway, the main thoroughfare of The Woodlands, a community of 105,000 people with 2,000 businesses. Many petitioners specifically mentioned the fact that a Brown & Gay study stated that as many as 6,000 more vehicles would negatively impact The Woodlands’ “main street,” during peak driving hours. “It seems the more we dig, the more we find,” Bunch said. A major concern is the misleading promise “No Tax Increase” by Commissioners. Community leader Peggy Hausman’s statement that “We spoke. They did NOT listen,” has become the battle cry of residents who do not believe that their taxes will not increase because of these bonds. Taxpayers are now receiving their annual assessed property values in the mail and are concerned that tax liabilities continue to rise every year causing fear of the repercussions that adding another $350 million debt could create. Township Director John McMullan told supporters in his newsletter that “I will not support a project that uses millions of our tax dollars to make our traffic worse and subsidizes real estate developers, all while leaving many of our county’s transportation needs unmet.”

Bunch agreed that taxpayers are not being heard when more than 5,000 Montgomery County residents have made written commitments to defeat this bond issue in favor of a more comprehensive, more targeted, and professionally planned bond issue in November or at a future election.”