Mike Krusee, Texas state representative
Mike Krusee, Texas state representative
Friday, 07 December 2007
Before he sits down to talk, State Rep. Mike Krusee sets his iPhone, which he bought on the first day they were available, down on the table. Krusee has never been afraid of new technology and innovation, whether it is in the form of a cell phone or a MetroRail system. Krusee has represented the Williamson County area since 1993, and in November, announced he would not run for re-election when his term expires in January 2009.
Q. What do you hope your legacy is in the legislature?
A. I tried to engage people in a fair and constructive manner. When I first got in to the legislature, I had models for my behavior, Paul Sadler was one of them. He always conducted himself in a fair way with everyone. I try to do the same thing and work with my colleagues to achieve calm, and that lacked in the last session. It doesn’t bother me when colleagues’ policy differs with mine. It’s no fun to just work with people who agree with you.
Q. Why do you think it is important for area government to think regionally?
A. In the ‘90s, all the political groups in the area fought and competed, and everyone suffered. The goals of these cities and counties efforts were to stop other people’s efforts. Leaders were jealous and there was a tit for tat mentality, ‘You kept us from having a baseball team, so we’re going to keep you from having water.’ There was such distrust and nothing got done. Things have changed a lot since then, cities refer leads to one another. Who cares where Samsung goes? It will create such wealth all around that it doesn’t matter. There’s strong competition to land a company like that, it takes all of us together. When I landed a position of power as the lieutenant to the speaker of the house, I went to the City of Austin and said, I know you might be worried because a Williamson County representative is in power, but I want Austin to succeed and we will end Austin bashing. We will find common ground in issues.
Q. How did you become interested in transportation?
A. I always thought transportation was a really boring, unsexy issue. It just seemed like, ‘How complicated is it?’ You have the gas tax out there and you collect it and then you redistribute the money to build roads — it just didn’t seem like there was a whole lot of room there for innovation and reform and so I spent most of my time during the ’90s on education issues, working with Gov. Bush. But then one day in the late ’90s, Dell Computer announced their next expansion was going to be in Nashville instead of Austin. When we asked them why, they said because our road infrastructure was inferior. And they had just-in-time delivery and nothing in Austin is just in time on our roads. And so that was the day I kind of woke up. We potentially lost 10,000 jobs on that day and that’s the day I discovered that while education is really important, transportation is too. I started looking into the issue and discovered there was a lot of room for innovation and reform, and not only was there room for it, but almost a desperate need for it. So I looked into it. What are we going to do? How are we going to prevent this from happening again? I knew they were supposed to be building 130 so I asked how we are doing on that. The answer was — TxDOT said, ‘Well, we’re studying that. We’re spending money.’ I tried to nail down the timeline for when 130 was going to be built and the answer was never. That was the truth that no one would speak: It was never going to be built. That’s when we started looking at new ways to fund it. The struggle to finance that road led us to even different ways of financing roads beyond the way we did 130.
Q. What do you like to read?
A. I read a lot of history. Well, right now I’m reading Genghis Khan — I get a lot of my ideas by reading history, an awful lot. The Trans-Texas Corridor came to me by reading a book by [Stephen Ambrose]. Nothing Like It in the World was about the building of the Trans-Continental Railroad. That was my summer reading project one year. What was fascinating about it to me was how they financed it. And they financed it basically through bonds, based on the future revenue they were going to get and through land values that were going to appreciate in the future. That thing was built during the Civil War, when we had no money. That’s amazing, they built it in the 1860s. There were tens of thousands of people working on this thing and billions of dollars — so that’s how I got the idea of building the Trans-Texas Corridor and how to finance it. The Trans-Continental Railroad was the biggest engineering project the world had ever seen and had a big impact on the world economy and the way the world developed then. Think, if we hadn’t been able to develop California. It’s the fourth largest economy in the world. Without the railroad, there is no California.
Now I’m reading Genghis Khan, and what it is really all about is free trade. That’s what we’re doing with the Trans-Texas Corridor and the freight line. We’re establishing trade routes. This is what this is all about.
- Education: Attended Georgetown University
- Family: Married with five children
- Contact: www.mikekrusee.com
Career Highlights - Elected to the House of Representatives, District 52 in 1993
- Chair of the House Transportation Committee (present)
- Member of the House Judiciary Committee (present)
- Member of the Executive Council of the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (CAMPO)
- Board member of the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) in 2005
- Helped lay the foundation for bringing a branch of Texas State University to Round Rock in 2003
- Helped create framework for the Trans-Texas Corridor cross-state tollways in 2003
- Sponsored legislation that gave new powers and money to local toll agencies and allowed existing highways to have toll roads added in 2003
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