How To Stop The Trans-Texas Corridor

“How To Stop The Trans-Texas Corridor

I’ve been told that the Trans-Texas Corridor is just a “boring highway story.”

But if you plan on traveling through Texas between now and election day, Nov. 7, don’t be scared by the loud scissor sounds.

It’s probably the millions of Texas voters attempting to cut the strings of the political puppets that favor the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC).

This 4,000-mile-long, four-football-field-wide corridor is supposedly going to be designed to transport people, oil, gas, water, electricity, broadband data, and goods via truck, rail, and utility lines up from the Mexico-Texas border near Laredo to the Oklahoma border.

Proponents of the TTC say that the proposed superhighway is to make money for new highway projects, increase economic growth within the state, and alleviate the state’s growing traffic problems.

Opponents of the TTC say that should the road be constructed, an estimated million people would be displaced, 100,000 acres of prime land would be out of agricultural production, tens of thousands of jobs would be lost, property would be removed from the tax rolls, wildlife and hunting interests would be compromised, businesses in small towns would dry up, terrorists would have a huge ready-made target, and citizens would be taxed twice since they already pay for highways through gasoline taxes, vehicle registration fees, and at auto supply retailers.

In addition, Texas farmers, ranchers, small businesses, landowners, urban dwellers, environmentalists, Libertarians, Democrats, and even the state Republican Party are also supremely pissed over not being able to vote up or down on the TTC in the first place.

The man who hatched this “boondoggle” — Gov. Rick Perry — however, claims that voters did have an opportunity to vote for it in the form of a constitutional amendment, “Proposition 15,” back in 2001.

While Prop 15 passed with 67.3 percent of the vote, the wording on the ballot read:

“The constitutional amendment creating the Texas Mobility Fund and authorizing grants and loans of money and issuance of obligations for financing the construction, reconstruction, acquisition, operation, and expansion of state highways, turnpikes, toll roads, toll bridges, and other mobility projects.”

And as you can see, neither the ballot nor anywhere in the Texas House briefing on Prop 15 had any reference to the proposed construction of the super-transportation corridor, so argue the Texans opposed to the TTC.

According to comments made by Texas Transportation Commissioner Ric Williamson on June 27, 2002, it would seem that Gov. Perry had been hiding the TTC from the public all along:

“Once the Governor decided that this is where we needed to head, he wanted to remove it from the political flow of the state, he wanted it to become policy as opposed to politics, and that was one of the reasons he asked us to move so fast, and we’ve done an admirable job….”

So, to stop the TTC policy from becoming reality, the anti-TTC forces plan to remove the Republican governor and his corrupt henchmen in the Texas Legislature from public office this fall.

In Perry’s place, a host of anti-TTC and anti-toll road organizations have for the most part backed Carol Keeton Strayhorn, a Democrat turned Rep”