Here’s hoping that some of our Texas lawmakers bound for Austin this week get stuck in a little of the traffic congestion that often clogs our highways, especially Interstate 35.

Maybe that’ll spur interest in the state’s more crucial business — including sustainable funding for our crumbling or outmoded highways — when legislators gather Wednesday for the special session called by Gov. Rick Perry.

Perry and others suggest this session will be short, even sweet. By law, the governor limits what lawmakers can address during a special session, and Perry’s kept this agenda narrow. He says state lawmakers could be done in three or four days.

Frankly, we had hoped for a longer session to really take apart the problems behind highway funding and homeowners insurance. Certainly, both issues will loom over this week’s session, but the governor merely wants to enact some important housecleaning measures regarding them.

The business at hand:

* Reauthorizing five state agencies due by law to expire before the next regular session, including the Texas Department of Transportation and Department of Insurance.

* Approving issuance of $2 billion in highway construction funds approved earlier by voters, which just means we’re borrowing the money. Approving this doesn’t address the crushing, long-term problem of sustainable funding for roads and highways.

* Allowing the Department of Transportation to contract with private companies to build roads. That means at least some debate about funding and, yes, the evils of tolls.

Some people oppose toll roads mightily. Unfortunately, they also seem to oppose every other way to fund road construction, including hiking gas taxes.

Any discussion should include Sen. John Carona’s proposal permitting local tax options, allowing municipal or county taxpayers the right to decide if they want to assume new tax burdens to ensure better or safer roads and highways in their areas.

Yes, anti-tax legislators fought this tooth-and-nail last month. However, we believe in the basic tenets of local control. If local voters want to approve specially targeted funding to build or improve particular roads and bridges in their area, who is the state to tell them they can’t?

To us, this all looks like more than four days’ work. With gas-tax receipts for road construction down 8 percent in April alone and The Dallas Morning News reporting that highway construction money will run out by 2012, we’d say the situation is critical.

Without good roads and highways, Perry and others who pride themselves in Texas’ pro-business climate risk kissing our economic future goodbye.

Judging from the online comments at wacotrib.com, some folks are more understanding than others about delays of up to several hours in processing drivers licenses at the local Texas Department of Public Safety office at 1617 East Crest Drive.

DPS officials tell us that the delays involve a new computer system that will update information faster than previous systems.

Problem: It may take DPS officials time to figure out how all that works.

A Trib reporter who visited the local DPS office recently found people experiencing waits of three to five hours. One woman who made it to a clerk said the renewing of her daughter’s license took 45 minutes.

Worse, phone calls to the office go unanswered during business hours.

State officials better fix all this. You know things are really bad when people start comparing you to the federal government.