Free Republic

Pat Hensen spent a good part of his 35-year career with the Soil Conservation Service (now Natural Resource Conservation Service) helping Texas Blacklands farmers improve their land. And he’s invested considerable time, effort and money the last 20 years doing the same on his own or leased acreage. And it may all end up under yards of concrete and asphalt if the Trans Texas Corridor passes muster and follows the latest proposed route. “My farm would be in the middle of it,” Hensen says from his Bell County living room where he and wife Loretta participate in a grassroots campaign...

The slightly rolling hills about five miles east of Troy is where Robert Fleming tills the Blackland soils day after day, providing a living off the land for his wife and children. Wistfully looking over a field of six-inch high corn on April 5, Fleming agonized over the realization that the first section of the Trans-Texas Corridor may plow smack through his property. According to the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the first leg of the toll road would flank Interstate 35 to the east from Dallas to San Antonio and would then follow I-35 to Laredo instead of Brownsville,...

TOURS – Trans-Texas Corridor critics denounced the state's handling of the project on Tuesday and called on McLennan County residents to organize against the proposed transportation network. In a meeting at Tours Hall in eastern McLennan County, speakers urged the roughly 200 attendants to slow down or stop the Texas Department of Transportation's plan to build a network of tolled highways, railways and utility infrastructure from San Antonio to Dallas. “We have to raise the political cost, and how you raise political cost is you organize,” said Chris Hammel, chairman of the Bell County anti-corridor group Blacklands Coalition. The McLennan...