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Many in the great state of Texas have a lot to say about a proposed network of toll roads and railway lines known as the Trans-Texas Corridor. The Texas Department of Transportation received more than 27,000 public comments during a three-month comment period on a proposed corridor project called the TTC-69, said TxDOT spokesman Mark Cross. Transportation officials had 47 public hearings in February and March and accepted written comments through April 18 on the environmental and social impact of the corridor. Comments ranged from flat-out opposition to the corridor to suggestions about how to lessen its impact, Cross told...

RUSH: Snerdley says we have a lot of people calling about oil today. I'm getting e-mails about this, too, and there obviously is some kind of campaign out there to have oil discussed. You know, the story out there past couple of days is "experts" say that the barrel price of oil will soon hit $200 -- and this is roiling the markets, they say. Now, I want you to stop and think about something, folks. If $200-a-barrel oil leads to the pump price of $10 a gallon at the gasoline pump, let me just ask you a simple question....

JACKSON, Ga. - A Georgia man who killed his live-in girlfriend was executed Tuesday, the first inmate put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injections. William Earl Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51 p.m. EDT, Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman Mallie McCord told The Associated Press. It came less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected efforts to block it. The roughly three dozen states around the country that use lethal injection held off on carrying out any executions for more than seven months while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality...

On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced he had appointed Deirdre Delisi, his former chief of staff, chairwoman of the Texas Transportation Commission, which oversees the Texas Department of Transportation. As of today, I will not vote to confirm her appointment in the next legislative session. Ask almost any Texan, especially those who have the need to travel frequently on Interstate 35, about our Texas transportation system and they will tell you that many of our roads have extreme congestion, while other construction projects have experienced significant cost overruns. Last year, TxDOT notified the public that it had experienced a...

AUSTIN — Maybe Texas’ transportation problems are a lot simpler to understand than recent fights over toll roads make it seem, North Texas leaders told state senators Wednesday. “My first recommendation: You need to provide a lot more revenue for transportation,” Michael Morris, transportation director for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, told the Texas Senate transportation committee. That was hardly the only suggestion from Mr. Morris or the many others who spoke to the committee, which is seeking input as it readies an approach on toll roads, TxDOT and more for the next legislative session. But it might...

AUSTIN – Gov. Rick Perry promised to keep fighting for private toll roads and his other transportation priorities Tuesday during his first major speech on the subject since the death in December of transportation commission chairman Ric Williamson. "This is a place for big challenges, not big excuses," he told state Transportation Department employees and highway experts from around the country at the annual Transportation Forum. Next year's legislative session, he said, can't be anything like last year's. "The Legislature must understand that 'no' is not a solution," Mr. Perry said. "It is an abdication of responsibility." Before last year's...

For years, Texas has been planning a privately financed super turnpike from Mexico to the Oklahoma border. But like rush-hour traffic, the plan for a Trans-Texas Corridor is only inching along. "It ran into a firestorm of controversy in Texas,” said Neal McCaleb, a former Oklahoma transportation secretary. Critics have a wide range of concerns about the corridor, which has a key stretch that would parallel Interstate 35. (Another stretch would extend from the Texarkana/Shreveport area to Mexico.) Particularly upset are landowners who may be in the corridor's path. The Texas Transportation Department calls many concerns myths. The department says,...

Several Oklahoma legislators are concerned that individuals and organizations are quietly working on plans to create a privately-operated tollway in Oklahoma. Many referred to Spain-based Cintra, which has been involved in the development of a proposed Trans-Texas Corridor. Cintra also took over the operation of the Indiana East-West Toll Road from the Indiana Department of Transportation in 2006. Oklahoma State Sen. Randy Brogdon and state representatives Eric Proctor, Richard Morrisette, Scott Inman and Charles Key all expressed concern that efforts to open up Oklahoma to a privately operated tollway system were being kept out of the view of the general...

Los Angeles -- Two people were murdered in Los Angeles during the first 18 hours of a 40-hour symbolic "murder moratorium" to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., police said.

State Rep. Jim McReynolds has sent a letter to the Texas Department of Transportation saying he thinks TxDOT should drop the idea of tying the Trans-Texas Corridor in with plans for routing Interstate 69 through East Texas. McReynolds says tremendous negative outcry from his constituents and other East Texas residents has made it clear to him no one wants infrastructure that massive and disruptive to the quality of life to be built, taking big swaths out of the Pineywoods countryside. "Within the past several weeks, I have personally attended every TxDOT hearing held in my district regarding this proposed corridor,"...

How can one tell an issue has truly arrived? Politicians rush to prove themselves authentic on it. That appears to have happened with the pork moratorium proposed by Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), as all three Senators still running for President have now agreed to co-sponsor his resolution: Obama joined with other lawmakers last year to obtain almost $100 million worth of earmarks for Illinois. Clinton worked with others to win $342 million in pet projects for New York and Pelosi obtained $94 million for California.“We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United States should impose a death penalty moratorium and stop sentencing young offenders to life in prison until it can root out racial bias from its justice system, a United Nations panel said on Friday. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination also called on Washington to end the racial profiling of Americans of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent, and to ensure immigrants and non-nationals in the country are not mistreated. The 18 independent experts expressed concern that racial minorities in the United States were more likely to be sentenced to death, or to...

Texas spirit was alive and well at the Navasota DEIS public hearing on Feb. 28. Opposition groups, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, came from as far as Washington, D.C. to give recorded testimony, and get a first hand look at TxDOT process procedures. Assistant Director of Communications, Leigh Strope, who attended the meeting on behalf of the 34,000 Texas Teamsters Union members, says, “Teamsters want to stop the dangerous trend of selling our roads and bridges to foreign investors so they can slap tolls on the driving public. We are also concerned because the Trans-Texas Corridor would form...

ROBSTOWN, Tex. — Leon Little’s farm here near Corpus Christi would not be seized for Texas’s proposed $184-billion-plus superhighway project for 5 or 10 years, if ever. But Mr. Little was alarmed enough to show up Wednesday night with hundreds of his South Texas coastal neighbors to do what the Texas Department of Transportation has been urging: “Go ahead, don’t hold back.” Don’t worry. Texans have gotten the message, swamping hearings and town meetings across the state to grill and often excoriate agency officials about a colossal traffic makeover known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, a public-private partnership unrivaled in the...

Sometimes the truth just has a way of coming to light. A public information officer with the Texas Department of Transportation this week wrote a column in the Herald-Press describing the financial woes facing TxDOT and how because of those problems the state’s transportation department doesn’t have the money to deal with many of the state’s transportation issues. Apparently, several of the state’s senators do not feel that is the case at all. David Dewhurst called out the state’s interim chairwoman of the Texas Transportation Commission, Hope Andrade, on this very issue, according to a story from the Associated Press....

Grimes County commissioners and County Judge Betty Shiflett made sure they attended a TTC/I-69 meeting at the Walker County Fairgrounds last week, as residents previously demanded they take a stronger stance against the proposed route through Grimes County. Shiflett received a roaring applause from audience members with her speech that ended with the question, “What part of “no” do you not understand?” Shiflett added that Grimes County was not given an option for having a town meeting, just the environmental meeting. “Representative Lois Kolkhorst stole the show as she announced loud and clear that she was against TTC I-69,” said...

Gov. Rick Perry's ambitious Trans-Texas Corridor plan, and his advocacy of toll funding for future roads, hit the skids in a skeptical Legislature last spring. The road shows no signs of getting any smoother as state transportation officials try to sell the plan to Houston-area audiences. "This will wipe me out," Dee Bond told a panel of corridor advocates at a town hall meeting in Rosenberg last week. The panel, which included Texas Transportation Commissioner Ned Holmes of Houston and Steve Simmons, deputy executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, was there to explain and gather comment on a...

It’s looking like a tough year for toll roads in Texas, and no one could be happier about that than Terri Hall, the San Antonio woman whose group is leading the grassroots fight against the controversial pay-to-drive roads that Gov. Rick Perry and others want to see crisscrossing the state. In September, Hall and her group, Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom (TURF), filed suit in the state district court in Austin against the Texas Department of Transportation, alleging that TxDOT has broken the law by using public funds to lobby legislators for laws favoring toll roads. TURF and Hall...

2007 ended on a sad note for the family and friends of Ric Williamson, the chairman of the Texas Transportation Commission who died Sunday after a heart attack. Given his aggressive and often controversial role in reshaping Texas highway construction, his death leaves the state and Gov. Rick Perry with an important question about how to move forward after Williamson’s memorial service today. Williamson, 55, a successful business owner and former state representative from Weatherford, was appointed to the transportation commission in 2001 by his good friend Perry and was named chairman in 2004. He became a passionate advocate of...

Push for higher gas tax could follow chief's death The death of Ric Williamson, the fiery, whip-smart chairman of the state transportation commission, could upend the still-roiling debate over toll roads in Texas in the new year. Mr. Williamson died Saturday of a heart attack at age 55, sending shock waves through the nearly 15,000-employee department he led as well as the political and policy circles where his combative style and pro-toll-road agenda had engendered enormous change – and criticism. Always careful to credit Gov. Rick Perry, a close friend and former roommate, Mr. Williamson emerged as a lightning rod...