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February/March 2007
Volume I; Issue 1
Special Report:
Trans Texas Corridor

Forever Changed
The People in the Path of the TTC
By Marty McElhaney

Nancy Walker’s voice catches as she talks about growing up on the farm her great grandfather established in 1871. She remembers the good times when her grandmother would go down to the creek with her and her brother to the “sliding place” that her grandmother and siblings had made so long ago. They would climb to the top of the creek bank and slide like little otters down into the stone-bottomed creek to frolic in the cool water. Yellow flowers bloomed along the creek when her grandmother was a little girl, Nancy said. They are still there.

But with the threat of the Trans Texas Corridor casting a dark shadow across the land, Nancy, who now lives near Austin, fears she will have nothing left of the farm but memories. “This land has been in our family for 135 years. My family will lose our farm if the Corridor is built,” she worries. “Do we want to see Texas soil run over by millions of cars, crushed under the weight of tons of freight?” Nancy voices what many Texans believe when she says, “It is a disastrous plan in which politicians, big business interests and developers will profit and Texans’ lives will be changed forever.”

Nancy and her husband had planned to rent out their share of the farm to supplement their retirement, but those plans are now in limbo. “From the satellite map, it looks like the connector is going right through the house and yard of the home place. I was horrified to see that communication lines and freight lines plowing right through the creek.” Nancy stops to compose herself. “My brother and I used to look for arrow heads in the creek after a rain. We used to have Easter egg hunts down there with our little Sunday school class.”

When Rick Perry was campaigning for re-election this fall, he brushed off critics of the unpopular Trans Texas Corridor by telling them in essence; “you silly people will change your minds about the corridor. Farmers complained when the farm to market roads were built too, but no one is complaining now,” Perry says. Nancy remembers when the farm to market road near her farm was built. “We didn’t mind,” she said. “That road goes somewhere, but this [TTC] doesn’t really connect to where most of us would want to go.”

“If our farm is taken through eminent domain we would probably not get what we thought it was worth. And if we have to re-invest the money, where are you going to find more farmland?” Even if you find something, it won’t be the same.”

The Hajda family has farmed around Granger for over one hundred years and Wesley Hajda worries about those things, too. If TTC remains in its current path, the Corridor will split Wesley’s property in two, only a half mile from the house where Hajda has lived for forty years. Besides enduring the noise and pollution from millions of cars and trucks, Hajda will have to drive miles to cross the quarter mile corridor to reach his cattle and the rest of his farm on the other side. It will disrupt his life and that of his neighbors and the community where he has spent his life. If he has to relocate, where would he go and how would he replace what was taken from him?

Nancy’s sister-in-law, Lisa Pope still lives in the house Nancy’s father built in 1941. Lisa’s husband passed away two years ago and Lisa is wheel-chair bound after suffering a stroke. She speaks of the “precious memories” of life on the farm and she doesn’t know where she would go if the state took her home. “I don’t want my home taken away,” she says. “It’s the only thing I have left to give my son.”

“It is an emotional tie that I have to the land. I never intended to sell it,” Nancy says. “When I go out there I feel peace. It’s not only a place, it’s a way of life. It’s like I can go home. My parents are gone, my brother is gone, but I can still go there.” “I don’t want the money. It’s not the money. It’s the history, the memories.”

Keesie Kothmann builds roads but he has never seen a road like the one TxDoT and Governor Perry plan to ram through the heart of Texas. He doesn’t like the Trans Texas Corridor and the politics that drive it.

Texans first heard of the mighty highway in 2002, when Rick Perry was running for his first full term as governor. Perry said it was the highway to the future, but many Texans, including Keesie Kothmann, think rather, it is highway robbery. “There was no opposition to TTC early on because no one knew about it. It was conceived and executed without public knowledge long before Perry unveiled it,” Kothmann believes.

Kothmann, president of Mann Construction Ltd., in Hutto, Texas, a sixth-generation Texan, says, “The project encompasses 600,000 acres.” “It is not an expansion of an existing right of way and nothing; not wetlands, not farms, nothing stops it from the direction it wants to take.”

Texas needs this highway, preach its supporters, to handle the millions of new residents clamoring to get in, but Kothmann points out, “TTC bypasses those locations; Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, where it is supposed to relieve traffic congestion; the main urban areas that are the reason for the traffic being where the traffic is.

There are no wagon ruts in the road from the Red River to Laredo in the path [its planners] want to put it. It is a road that leads to nowhere, like the Alaska bridge to nowhere.

Furthermore, Kothmann says, “there’s not an overwhelming demand for another roadway project outside the limits of the existing I 35 corridor. It leads you to believe that this project is cloaked in secrecy for military purposes, evacuation from a catastrophe that hasn’t happened yet, or it is for personal gains. Follow the money. It is only now becoming known to the public that the TTC is the first leg of a planned NAFTA Superhighway. That must be another reason why our southern borders are allowed to remain open with no effort to stop illegal immigration.”

“Normally highway projects are built in phases: Phase I, Phase II and so on; a project of this size, this scope has never been built. This project goes from the Oklahoma border to Mexico; under one contract, almost one contractor,” he says.

That contractor is the Spanish firm Cintra and the San Antonio-based Zachry Construction Corp. Texas has handed the foreign company the keys to the state to build, maintain, and set and collect tolls for the fifty-year life of the contract. It also allows the foreigners “to accelerate the normal process of road building; the feasibility studies, water studies, conservation, archeology studies; a process that can take twenty years,” condensing it into a time frame that meets the demands of the major players.

Another troubling aspect of the contract is the “no compete” clause which means TxDoT has agreed not to improve any roadways that run parallel to the TTC for the duration of the Cintra lease and as the nearby highways deteriorate, traffic will be forced onto the toll roads.

If this highway goes through, Keesie believes, nothing will be the same. “I don’t know of anyone besides a politician who wants this road. It’s wrong. Life as we know it won’t be the same as today.”

“We don’t know how we will be affected by the corridor because we can’t get straight answers out of anyone,” says Carol Fox. Carol is a retired Temple College English instructor in Taylor. “Nobody will tell us the truth. But I will be directly affected even if it doesn’t come over my house. It is destroying Texas. It is being sold as being of benefit to the people of Texas but nothing could be further from the truth. It does not benefit the people of Texas, in fact it destroys the way of life of many rural Texans.”

Carol minces no words describing her contempt for Governor Perry’s prize hog. “I think it is outrageous that a foreign company will have a fifty-year contract. Toll roads to me, are very regressive. TTC is obviously a money-making business for the foreign companies, which have no interest in Texas or its infrastructure.”

News is rapidly spreading that the Trans Texas Corridor is the lynch pin of an ambitious plan to build a NAFTA Superhighway from the Chinese-controlled port of Lazaro-Cardenas on Mexico’s Pacific coast, through America’s heartland and into Canada. Cargo going through Mexico and across the Texas border will not be inspected until it reaches Kansas City, Missouri, prompting Texans to label TTC the “Drug Lord Express,” Carol says.

The corridor was kept under wraps until all the pieces were firmly in place, only then did TxDoT share some of its plans with the public in what Carol calls; “those kangaroo meetings with that ridiculous little video.” As people realized the negative impacts of the road, opposition rolled across Texas like a blue norther.

Nowhere is that rebellion more fierce than in Williamson County, where area landowners, including Carol Fox, Keesie Kothmann and Nancy Walker, have joined together to stop the march of the TTC. At first, it was just a handful of people, but as word spread that counter measures were being initiated, more and more people climbed on board. TxDoT had refused to release the contents of the Master Development Plan since May 2005, in spite of orders from the Attorney General, Greg Abbott.

But, after its offices were flooded with Open Records requests from nearly a thousand Texans last fall, TxDoT finally made the information available on its website. Outraged citizens are now demanding the legislature put a stop to it and some are actually listening, as a few bills have been offered attempting to pull TTC’s teeth.

There is a lot of money and power driving the road, but despite those odds, Carol remains optimistic. “I think there is a good chance that we can thwart this thing. There is absolutely nothing to recommend it to the people of Texas. I am hopeful we can all work together to stop it. Of all things, this requires us to manifest those virtues that rural people are known for; coming together as a community and working to support one another.”