Posted on 09/09/2011 3:09:31 PM PDT by free me
The less the Trans-Texas Corridor is brought up during the Republican presidential primaries, the better for Rick Perry.
Although it was officially killed in the most recent Texas legislative session, the proposed massive transportation and infrastructure project and ensuing debacle could still end up being a thorn in the governor's side as he preaches his anti-big government mantra on the campaign trail.
As originally proposed and backed by Perry, the state of Texas would have taken more than 500,000 acres of private land to build the 1,200-foot-wide toll road. The majority of those acres were agricultural lands and wildlife habitats, and many are part of the state's Blackland Prairies, some of the richest farmland in the country.
"It was so expansive and so wide, unlike any highway ever built. It was an enormous size," said Terri Hall, founder and director of Texans United for Reform and Freedom, a group that has opposed the project. "A fully built-out interstate is only about 400 feet wide. It was a huge land grab."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
It made a lot of people happy when they finally killed it.
it made the whole of tx happy. It made some folks in Spain not so happy and Rick would like to build it using his field of dreams speech. no fan or RP - rant
They are doing this in Georgia, on a similar degree.
In Georgia during the post 2k days, land was a gold mine in Georgia. All of the politicians bought land and control adjacent access to their property.
they sure made a lot of money at the taxpayer expense. We are still paying for it in Gwinnett County. Our leaders bought land for a ‘PUBLIC” baseball field and purchased the land before it was made public.
Same thing here with the Corridor.
So the NEW F’in YORK media is going to rehash the Lat Gov. Election?
For the record Perry won with 55% of the vote.
Fun Factoid:
Perry also refused to speak to newspaper editorial boards. White ended up pulling in major newspaper endorsements.
Polls the past few weeks showed that the debate refusal didn’t appear to hurt Perry, the state’s longest-serving governor. He continued to hold a lead in polls and even expanded his advantage to double digits by the final weekend before the election.
White accused Perry of staying in office too long and using state job creation funds to reward his campaign contributors. Perry attacked White over his investment with a company that helped the city in its emergency response during Hurricane Rita.
The race turned even nastier in the final week when Perry launched an ad claiming Houston’s policies toward enforcing immigration laws played a role in the shooting death of a police officer who was killed by an illegal immigrant.
Better kill ObamaCare healthscare too otherwise all of America will pay a huge toll down the road to economic oblivion.
In may places in the USA, the roads are crowded and in bad condition, thereby costing motorists time, gasoline, and car maintenance. The worst that can be said about this road is that it was wider than necessary in light of the traffic and thus would not have generated the toll revenue to pay for it. But there are people out there who believe that this road was part of a “new world order” plot to merge the United States with Mexico. Other opponents are part of the don’t-build-anything-anywhere environmental left. And, of course, there are the libertarians who think that any use of eminent domain is sin,even though we would have very few roads without it.
Rim shot!
Rim shot!
Here are the facts that were facing Governor Perry: Texas’ population is estimated to almost double by 2040 (growing by about 1,200 people a day right now). We’ll be approaching 44 to 45 million people by then. That’s not so far away. The TTC was an ambitious attempt to create a state-of-the-art, coordinated system of thousands of miles of roadways, rail lines, and gas transportation systems without raising taxes.
Fifty percent of the population in Texas is in the I-35 north/south corridor (roughly paralleling the route of the TTC). Infrastructure improvements (particularly roads) in that part of the state will be required to accommodate the growth.
What were his options?
The options were: 1) do nothing, and the state becomes so congested, the air quality gets impacted so negatively in those metropolitan areas along I-35 that you stifle economic growth. We know that doing nothing is not an acceptable alternative.
Or, 2) we could raise the gas tax by about $1/gal. That’s what the experts estimated that it would take, and it’s not sure that is even close to feasible. In recent years, it had been politically impossible to raise the gas tax by even a nickel or a dime/gal.
3) Wait for Washington to fund it? Well, good luck doing that. Our congressional delegation has not been very successful in getting Texas much more than nine cents back out of every dime that is sent to Washington in gas tax. Texas is a major donor state. Source: Environmental Working Group.
Finally, the last option was to use a Public/Private Partnership (P3) such that the private sector would build the infrastructure, and then recoup their investment via a user fee, i.e. tolls. It is important to note that P3s are a financing option, not a revenue source. Some current P3 examples in other states are: the Chicago Skyway, the South Bay Expressway in California, and the Capital Beltway high-occupancy toll lanes in DC. Here are more details on P3s from the Federal Highway Administration.
I-35 would have remained in place for those people who chose not to pay the toll. No “free” highways would have been converted to toll roads.
Some people are confused … they use the term “freeways.” There is no such thing as a freeway, no such thing as a free highway. There are only tax-funded roads and toll-funded roads.
Nevertheless, the TTC is now dead in Texas. It cannot be resurrected under any other name. In fact, the governor recently signed HB 1201, which removed all remaining references to the TTC from state statutes. Perry has not attempted to resurrect it or do an “end run” around the legislature and the people. Here is a local (Houston) story that sums up the public outcry over the TTC.
By law, toll roads in Texas can never be owned by anyone other than the state and are not being “leased away.” The public never relinquished ownership of any state roads.
The governor signed a law in 2005 that prevents a free road from being “converted” to a toll road. This is current law under the Transportation Code, Chapter 228.201 and he signed SB 18 on May 19, 2011, a bill which strengthened property owner’s rights when eminent domain is exercised by a government entity. Eminent domain “land grabs” were one of the big concerns that Texans had relating to the TTA.
Unlike the current administration in Washington, Perry finally heard the people and backed off.
While driving my daughter back to begin a new semester at Baylor University, I received a call from the Governor's office requesting that I invite a group of my fellow Texas Conservative Coalition legislators to his office to meet with him and TXDOT leadership. The following week several of us met with Governor Perry and the TXDOT Commissioner and Executive Director to share the frustration and opposition of our constituents across the state to the TTC. After a lengthy meeting, Governor Perry did something that has made me respect him as I have no other leader which I have observed or served alongside. He sat back in his chair, gave our arguments thought and said, “Tell your constituents you talked to the Governor, and the Trans-Texas Corridor is no more.” To this day, the handful of legislators in attendance at that meeting have respected Rick Perry—a man who was confident, honest, and exhibited absolute integrity to his citizens. He often does not receive the proper recognition and credit he deserves for his decisive response to the will of Texas citizens against the TTC. When presented with their objections and opposition, he brought a halt to the ill-conceived TTC. This is in stark contrast to our current President who sees the destructive results of his policies and has no intention of admitting fault or changing course, but instead blames everyone else for his errors in judgment.
I doubt it the topic will matter at all in the election. But, for the record, I absolutely loathed the idea of this toll monstrosity (an ultra-wide conglomeration of multi-lane highway, railroad tracks, pipelines, power-lines and whatever else was thrown into the mix). It would have split Texas in half, and required huge overpass bridges all up and down, cutting through a thousand farms, just to create some gigantic new artery to connect us to Mexico.
So because the voters of Texas reelected Perry in 2010 we're supposed to consider problems in his record prior to that time as a closed matter? Texas voters have the last say on what is and is not fair game in the debate about Perry? That's MoveOn.org logic.
I nearly puked when I first heard of this. Thank goodness our legislature vetoed it. This would have divided our state in half, and was a terrible idea. It would have gone all the way to the Mexican border, allowing many more big trucks to come through...and many of these trucks were dangerous as they don’t have to be inspected, and were known for things like brake failures.
If Perry wins the nomination, I’ll vote for him—anybody but obammy. However, he certainly wouldn’t be my first choice.
Run Sarah, run!
Well closing the border would probably cause that to be a negative number.
You guys are just faking it. With this enormous drought that’s burning up everything in Texas those landowners would LOVE a buyer to come along and buy it off their hands.
What is it you imagine interstate quality highways do? Do they perhaps subdivide rattle snakes into entirely new subspecies that'll be able to bite you all that many more times?
Will the jackrabbits proliferate into 2 to 20 genus with gazillions of species, all hopping up and down all day long driving you batty.
Evolution moves slower than that. The Great Ice Age desert will return to most of Texas long before those rattlers get longer, shorter, fatter, thinner, meaner, milder or more venomous.
I-69 probably killed TTC.
It didn’t make me happy. We needed a bigger road to replace I-35, we still do now.
Ofcourse not. But try not to act like it’s some gottcha thing. These old stories false and true will get the breathless treatment from NY msm. Just like the false Gore campaign manager thing.
And a big yawn elsewhere.
“For the record Perry won with 55% of the vote.”
THAT IS NOT TRUE...
He only received 35% of the total vote and 39% of the gubernatorial vote (Many voted none of the above,including my wife.)I voted for the non-Dem opposition as a protest vote.
The TTC was going to tear our county apart with no local benefits...
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