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Political trio hits the road – and the governor, too

By Mike Anderson [Waco] Tribune-Herald staff writer

Saturday, March 25, 2006

SEATON, Texas – Three gubernatorial candidates Friday night raised their voices in a chorus of opposition to the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor and the Republican governor who crafted it.

About a thousand people gathered at Seaton Star Hall, near Temple, to hear speeches by Democratic candidate Chris Bell and independent candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman focusing on the increasingly controversial transportation plan.

Gov. Rick Perry, who proposed the corridor in 2002 as a way to accommodate the state's projected trade and population growth, didn't attend Friday's event.

The proposed corridor would bisect Texas from the Mexican border to Oklahoma and bring together highways, rail and utility infrastructure in a 1,200-foot-wide tollway. The corridor is expected to parallel Interstate 35 and pass through McLennan County. State highway officials could announce the 10-mile-wide environmental impact study area for the corridor in the next few weeks.

Friday's program was hosted by the Bell County group Blackland Coalition, formed in April 2005 to oppose the corridor plan. Coalition chairman Chris Hammel said the group opposes the proposal in part because it would use eminent domain to acquire private property for the corridor when existing right of way is already available along I-35.

The group also objects to the possibility that a portion of the corridor passing through Central Texas could be operated as a toll road by a Spanish company, Cintra.

Rather than engage in debate, each of the gubernatorial candidates walked to the podium, discussed his or her opposition to Perry's corridor plan, then launched into other issues ranging from crime to school finance before quitting the hall.

Calling Perry's proposal "the Trans-Texas Catastrophe" and "the biggest land grab" in Texas history, state Comptroller Strayhorn said she was adamantly against the tollway project.

"Texas property belongs to Texans, not foreign companies," she said. "You cannot ask Texans to give up their land, then expect them to pay toll to drive their tractors across." Instead, she said, Interstate 35 should be expanded.

Peppering his comments with the humorous one-liners that have characterized his campaign, country-western musician and mystery novelist Kinky Friedman also expressed reservations about the tollway, including its operation by a Spanish firm.

"Folks, this is a bad idea," he said. "It's like having Dubai run the ports of America. I have an idea. Instead of the Trans-Texas Corridor, take four highways across Texas, name them after Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Bob Wills and Buddy Holly, none of them toll roads."

Friedman then talked about biodiesel fuel, an alternative fuel touted widely by Nelson.

Like Strayhorn, Bell criticized Perry for going to court to withhold details of the state contract with Cintra. He said Perry's handling of the corridor proposal has led many Texans to distrust their state government. He suggested the plan ought to be put on hold and taken to the Legislature to rework.

"I think the Trans-Texas Corridor is a product of the culture of corruption," Bell said. "Rick Perry's toll road boondoggle doesn't make any sense except for the road builders who've poured money into his campaign coffers."

Falls County resident Calvin Whatley said he was afraid the proposed corridor would cut through the farm that has been in his family 145 years.

"The main thing we are after is anything that will prevent this damnable highway," he said, adding that this included supporting anyone who could defeat Perry in the November election.

Milam County resident Stanley Glaser echoed Whatley's sentiments but said he also feared Friday night's trio of candidates will split the vote and ensure Perry's victory.

Hammel said the coalition invited Perry to speak at the event but never received a response from his campaign. Hammel said he believes Perry might have been afraid he would be ambushed by three candidates and a room full of people who oppose a project he proposed.

"If the governor came and wanted to defend the Trans-Texas Corridor, it would be our responsibility as hosts to make sure he got an open opportunity to share his views," Hammel said. "You get 1,000 people in a room, you can't guarantee someone won't give a catcall or something, but we would try to make sure that didn't happen."

Perry campaign manager Robert Black said Perry's absence was driven by pressing duties in the public school funding crisis rather than any fear of being ganged up on by corridor opponents and gubernatorial rivals.

"It's more of a situation that we are a few weeks from a special session and that is where his focus is right now," Black said. "However, this group does tend to be particularly hostile towards finding solutions to the transportation needs of Texas."

Hammel said the coalition has formed a political action committee and plans to again invite each of the four candidates to speak on separate occasions as the governor's race progresses. Based on their comments, the group will then pick one to endorse and will contribute campaign funds, he said.

Sixty-two corridor opponents contributed money to the PAC Friday night, Hammel said.

Candidate forum focuses on Trans-Texas Corridor

Bell, Strayhorn, Friedman rail against toll roads, Perry

By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Saturday, March 25, 2006

SEATON — The parking lot, and the clock, said it all.

At 6:05 p.m. Friday, almost an hour before the start of the Blackland Coalition's gubernatorial candidate forum on the Trans-Texas Corridor, the asphalt outside of the Seaton Star Hall east of Temple was already half full of pickups and cars. Outside, representatives of writer and musician Kinky Friedman and Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn were gathering petition signatures in their efforts to make the November ballot as independents and unseat Republican Gov. Rick Perry.

Inside, many of the 750 chairs were filled already. Folks in gimme caps, black Stetson hats and jeans were munching on sausage wraps and, when she happened by, listening to Strayhorn make her pitch one-on-one. Friedman and Democratic candidate Chris Bell showed up later in time to speak to the crowd, making it the three challengers' first joint appearance of the campaign.

By 7 p.m., the room was full, and the response to the challengers during the next two hours was full-throated, giving at least some indications that Perry has genuine political work ahead.

His plan for a network of cross-state toll roads and rail lines has many rural Texans in an independent frame of mind.

"This area went Republican" in the mid-1990s, said Inez Cobb, a board member of the year-old coalition formed in opposition to the corridor plan. "But they better watch their step or it might not be for long."

The path of the first leg of the corridor plan, to be called TTC-35, will parallel Interstate 35 and probably will pass within a few miles of Seaton.

Perry and legislative supporters of the corridor plan have been at pains over the past year to adjust it to address rural concerns, assuring people that most state and farm-to-market roads would connect to the corridor or pass over it.

They have strengthened protection for landowners who would have to give up land for the road.

Strayhorn spoke first, sprinkling toll and corridor talk amid a wide-ranging stump speech.

"Gov. Perry and his land-grabbing highway henchmen want to cram toll roads down Texans' throats," she said. To her right, there was a placard and seat for Perry, who was invited but did not attend. "In a Strayhorn administration, (the corridor) is going to be blasted off the bureaucratic books."

Friedman, next up, only lightly grazed the subject of the evening among a blitz of jokes.

"This is a bad idea," Friedman said and then hit on what is becoming a familiar theme among Perry's critics: that having Spanish company Cintra build and run the corridor project is wrong. "It's like having Dubai run the ports of America. It means we'll be paying tolls to a cowardly Spanish company for 70 years."

Bell told the crowd that he was there "to ask you to fire Rick Perry and stop the Trans-Texas Corridor. . . . We need roads, we all know that. What we don't need is to have our land taken away to benefit a private business."

Strayhorn, whose intention to supplant Perry in the Governor's Mansion has been well known for a couple of years, has periodically hammered Perry over his preference for toll roads as a solution to the Texas highway crunch.

She was quoted in January saying, "This voice is dead set against toll roads."

But the Perry campaign says that wasn't always the case, noting news releases and reports out of her office in 2000 and 2001 touting toll roads as the way to get roads built quickly and boost the state's economy.

That was, of course, before the Legislature overhauled transportation law and transformed toll roads from a concept into a reality.

"Carole Strayhorn's opposition to toll roads is a complete fraud," Perry spokesman Robert Black said this week. "She's been calling for toll roads for years."

Black said the corridor plan, despite demonstrations of widespread rural discontent such as Friday night's, won't hurt Perry in November.

"The governor believes that the vast majority of Texans, including rural Texans, understand that with a population expected to double in the next 40 years, the current Texas infrastructure can't handle that increase," Black said. "Something has to happen."

Gubernatorial Candidates Head To Central Texas

(March 24, 2006)—Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell and independent gubernatorial candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman are scheduled to address the controversial Trans Texas Corridor project and related eminent domain issuesFriday evening during a candidate forum in Bell County.

The forum, hosted by the Blackland Coalition, begins at 7 p.m. Friday at Seaton Star Hall, five miles east of Temple on State Highway 53.

Gov. Rick Perry was also invited to participate, but the coalition said he did not respond.

The coalition was formed “to educate, protect and defend Texans against the Trans Texas Corridor,” the group says.

Public hearings could begin as early as May around the state on plans for the project.

Work is underway on a 4,000-page draft environmental impact statement that will identify a 10-mile-wide route for the superhighway.

Once the draft is completed, hearings will be scheduled.

The principal study area is mainly along Interstate 35 from the Mexican border through Central Texas to the Oklahoma border, but alternative routes are also being considered that would shift the superhighway into East Texas.

More than 50 public hearings will be held once the draft report is finished.

The process of identifying what TXDOT calls “a narrowed study area” began in February 2004 and has involved more than 100 public meetings.

The Texas Department of Transportation signed a contract in April 2005 with the Cintra-Zachry consortium for planning on the controversial project, the most ambitious highway construction effort since the Eisenhower administration launched the effort to build an interstate highway system.

The $184 billion plan calls for a 4,000-mile network of transportation corridors that would crisscross the state with separate highway lanes for passenger vehicles and trucks, passenger rail, freight rain, commuter rail and dedicated utility zones.

Designers envision a corridor with six separate passenger vehicle lanes and four commercial truck lanes; two high speed passenger rail lines, two freight rain lines and two commuter rail lines and a utility zone that will accommodate water, electric, natural gas, petroleum, fiber optic and telecommunications lines.

Under the agreement, Cintra-Zachry began work on a master development plan for the first segment of the corridor, which will likely parallel Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Oklahoma.

Cintra, which is an international engineering and construction firm, and the San Antonio-based Zachry Construction Corporation, have agreed to provide $7.2 billion for construction of the first six segments of the project, the governor’s office said.

Cintra will spend $6 billion to build a four-lane toll road on the corridor and will pay the state $1.2 billion in return for the exclusive rights to operate the toll road for 50 years.

Cintra would also operate businesses along the route.

Officials in Interstate 35 corridor cities such as Waco and Dallas are concerned about the commercial impact of the project.

McLennan County Commissioners approved a resolution in February 2005 opposing the corridor.

The Waco-based Texas Farm Bureau also opposes the project because of concerns about the loss of farm and ranchland and the impact of the construction on the tax base of Texas counties and communities.

Click Here For Interactive Map Of Proposed Corridor Route

Click Here For Trans-Texas Corridor Web Site

Click Here For Background Information On The Trans-Texas Corridor

Click Here For An Opposing Point Of View From Corridor Watch