Free Republic

FORT WORTH -- The Trans-Texas Corridor is now so controversial, merely uttering the words in most political circles is taboo. "We're calling it a 'regional loop' because you can't say 'Trans-Texas Corridor' in the state of Texas anymore," said Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments. "The Trans-Texas Corridor is a lightning rod," he told visiting state representatives this week while explaining how the corridor would connect to regional highways by 2030. Opposition to the proposed construction of a $184 billion network of toll roads during the next 50 years is so strong statewide that...

SH 130 Concession Company LLC finalized the legal details of a financial close with Texas DOT on a $1,360m toll concession to build SH130 segments 5&6 Thursday and Friday last week in bankers' offices in New York City - at Orrick, 666 Fifth Avenue. The actual money flows should occur on Thursday or Friday (Mar 13 or 14) this week, Jose Maria Lopez de Fuentes, president of Cintra North America, told us this morning. Hundreds of documents and over 20 lawyers were involved last week representing TxDOT, private equity people, banks, mostly European, the TIFIA loan group from FHWA, and...

(April 3, 2007)—Gov. Rick Perry spoke out Tuesday against proposed legislation that would put a two-year moratorium on private toll road projects including the Trans-Texas Corridor and urged lawmakers to “ensure vital transportation projects continue as planned.� Several bills are pending in Austin aimed at putting the brakes on the massive highway project. State Representative Lois W. Kolkhorst of Brenham has filed a bill that would kill the project altogether and a second measure that calls for a two-year moratorium on allowing private entities from buying the rights to build and operate toll roads. During a visit with US Transportation...

The massive Trans-Texas Corridor project is a disaster for farms and ranches that lie in its proposed path, the Waco-based Texas Farm Bureau says. The Farm Bureau has been steadfast in its opposition to the project and says its encouraged by efforts in Austin to derail or at least delay the $184 billion plan, which ultimately 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. ?Our members are overwhelmingly opposed to the Trans Texas Corridor,? says TFB...

A State Auditor’s Office report on the Texas Department of Transportation and the Trans-Texas Corridor set for public release today estimates a $105.6 billion price tag for the TTC-35 portion alone of the massive transportation project. The TTC-35 represents 14 percent, or 560 miles, of the Trans-Texas Corridor’s proposed 4,000 miles of roadway criss-crossing the state. A 2002 estimate by TxDOT placed the cost for the entire Trans-Texas Corridor at between $145 and $184 billion. Taken as a whole, the Trans-Texas Corridor on its completion could become “the longest network of toll roads in the world,” according to the audit....

(January 26, 2007)--A legislator from San Antonio has filed a bill to kill GOP Gov. Rick Perry's Trans-Texas Corridor toll road proposal. Democratic Representative David Liebowitz says his measure would take away the Texas Department of Transportation's authority to buy land and do contracts for the project. Click Here For More Information Liebowitz told WOAI radio that the Trans-Texas Corridor would "destroy rural Texas as we know it." Perry's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Joe Krier with Texans for Safe Reliable Transportation believes the Liebowitz bill, which was filed Thursday, is a mistake. Krier says the...

Depending on the traffic, it could take quite a while for Parker County residents to make it to one of three transportation meetings slated to take place in local cities next week. Topics up for discussion at the meetings range from Parker County’s long-term transportation needs to finding solutions to the area’s short-term, immediate transportation problems. A discussion of the future roles of passenger rail, bypass routes and safety improvements is also expected. County officials have been asking for public meetings related to the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor for some time. The Corridor, an $8 billion multi-modal transportation plan developed by...

A recent poll posted at KeepTexasMoving.org, shows that visitors to the site consider land acquisition as the most pressing issue needing to be addressed regarding the planned Trans-Texas Corridor. Visitors to the site chose acquisition of property by an overwhelming 64 percent of the vote, with 14,280 votes. The next highest vote was for connectivity to cities with only 12 percent, or 2,659 votes. The Web site is published by the Texas Department of Transportation to release information regarding the planned Trans-Texas Corridor. The Trans-Texas Corridor is a large transportation plan envisioned by Gov. Rick Perry and TxDOT to provide...

Four thousand miles of smooth blacktop. Six open lanes of road with never a traffic jam. Four lanes for trucks to keep the 18-wheelers from bothering Joe Motorist. High-speed rail to get you from San Antonio to Dallas in just a couple of comfy hours. Oil, gas, and water lines running from Oklahoma to the Mexican border. Handy motels, shops, and gas stations to keep you from having to get off the road until you hit the state line. That’s the dream of the backers of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the biggest public works project in the history of the state...

Two private-sector groups have submitted proposals to develop the Trans-Texas Corridor-69, a 600-mile thoroughfare that may wind around Lufkin and Nacogdoches one day. The bid process is part of the effort to create a public-private partnership that the Texas Department of Transportation says would speed the construction of "one of the state's priority transportation projects." Trans-Texas Corridor-69, if and when it is built, is expected to connect with Interstate 69, which will stretch from Canada to Mexico. The proposed Texas corridor would start in South Texas and pass Houston, Lufkin and Nacogdoches before hitting Texarkana and/or breaking off into Louisiana....

Secret parts of a contract for the Trans-Texas Corridor have been out for more than two weeks now. So has a development plan that outlines how state transportation officials and a foreign-led consortium plan to plow the countryside with toll roads and railways to relieve growing traffic on Interstate 35. That's plenty of time to begin scouring the thousands of pages — on the Web at KeepTexasMoving.com — to find out what the big secret was. But so far, no one can or will say if there's a detail, some twist or mumbo jumbo that, if found, would blow the...

The Texas Transportation Commission unrolled Sept. 28 the long-awaited road map for the Trans-Texas Corridor. Release of the Master Development Plan will result also in public disclosure of the full contract between the state and Cintra-Zachry, a private joint venture between the Spanish firm Cintra and the Texas highway contractor Zachry. Both Cintra-Zachry and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) appealed a ruling from the Texas Attorney General’s office that the full contract is an open record. A trial was scheduled for Oct. 10 in Travis County district court. The master plan calls for the prompt building of seven segments...

Democratic Texas Supreme Court nominee Bill Moody said Monday that a construction firm may be using political contributions to win favor from the state’s highest civil court in a potential eminent domain lawsuit about the Trans-Texas Corridor. “My opponent and other members of the Supreme Court have taken sizable contributions from the Zachry group, well-knowing there is going to be an eminent domain case,” Moody said during a Waco campaign visit with the Tribune-Herald editorial board. Moody cited contributions from Zachry Construction Corporation’s political action committee and executives to his opponent, Republican Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, and four...

We Americans are a suspicious lot. Gas prices go down and a good many of us assume there's a conspiracy that starts and ends in the White House. Take the results of a recent Gallup poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement that the Bush administration "deliberately manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections." It's a good yarn, but I can't ignore the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who said they suspected President Bush of pulling a fast one heading into the Nov. 7 elections are registered Democrats. Plus,...

Drivers willing to pay to leave Interstate 35 in the dust could have an alternative as early as the summer of 2013. For 15 cents a mile, drivers could cruise the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor for nearly 100 miles, from Hillsboro to the north Austin suburbs. The rest of the 370-mile corridor could be running in 2017, the report said. That is according to a new 1,600-page master plan for the tollway, railroad and utility corridor that the firm Cintra-Zachry developed as it prepares to build the controversial project. The report said the company’s investment will increase by $3.5 billion, construction...

Revelations of secrecy and possible self-dealing in the compensation of some of the University of California's top administrators expose a problem deeper than the need for more transparent "communication" of the rationale behind them. The more significant issue is the rationale itself: the goal of privatizing higher education in California, which was made explicit in the recent "compact" between University of California President Robert Dynes, California State University Chancellor Charles Reed and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The compact substantially cut base public funding for higher education, required both UC and Cal State to impose large and rapid tuition increases as a...

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. -- Locking yourself out of your car is bad enough, but Jeanna Stewart was even more embarrassed when the culprit was not her, but her cat. The Morgantown resident said she was getting a spare house key out her car's trunk on Monday when her cat Mork, one of three in the car, stepped on the automatic door lock. She couldn't unlock the door because she had left her car keys on the driver's seat. "He wouldn't unlock the door for me," Stewart said Tuesday. "He was standing there, saying why aren't you opening the door? I want...

As the Spirit and Opportunity rovers continue their extended studies of Mars, NASA's Mars program appears headed for change. The shift will be driven by a variety of factors including technical and budget issues, as well as a "rebalancing" of science objectives. NASA has been engaged since last year in what the agency calls a road-mapping effort to flesh out the details of a Mars master plan that would lead to an expeditionary crew landing on that remote world. One scenario that has been under active discussion is slipping the mission of the mobile, nuclear-powered Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) from...

Che Guevara is more than just a sleazy tee shirt on an aging leftwinger's food-dribbled chest. Che Guevara is a live emblem of hemispheric terror, kidnapping and murder. And not just in the 1960s but happening right now. Today! The news, still in only Spanish, has just come out this afternoon. Colombia's government just released a tape proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that filthy Marxist narcoterrorist FARC and ELN guerrillas are operating a string of working terrorist camps inside Venezuela. And not just inside Venezuela in the way we thought they were, as Hugo Chavez-hosted recreational guerrilla spas,...

WASHINGTON — Retired general Wesley Clark warned Sunday that the failure to capture Saddam Hussein was likely to undermine any new Iraqi government. And he said it was important to capture Saddam alive so he could be tried for war crimes. Clark's comments, at a session with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service reporters and editors, came as the Bush administration was accelerating the turnover of civilian authority to Iraqis. Clark praised the decision as a move "in the right direction" but said no regime was likely to succeed if Saddam stayed on the lam. "It's going to be...