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

Creating Sacrificial Lambs
The Legislative Beginning of the TTC
By Dan Byfield

Although it has been in the works for many years, Governor Rick Perry claims credit for solving all of Texas’ future transportation needs by creating what some have called the state’s greatest boondoggle. The Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) is expected to start construction in early 2007, yet only a handful saw it coming.

Legislatively, it all started in 2003, when Mike Krusee took over the reigns of the Transportation Committee in the Texas House. No one in political circles understood why someone with no background, experience or any particular knowledge of the state transportation needs would be chosen for that position.

It wasn’t until after the session ended that anyone understood - the Republican leadership needed a water boy and Mr. Krusee fit the bill.

As chairman, Mr. Krusee filed several transportation bills, one of which was HB 3588. No one paid much attention to a one-page, innocuous bill. What a mistake.

After the late night, closed-door sessions ended and all the Christmas-tree amendments were added, the bill grew to over 100 pages and was designated the transportation omnibus bill for the session. It was a masterful move. Even by the end of the session, no one had caught onto the fact that the bill had such broad and overreaching implications.

Governor Perry signed the bill with no fanfare and no media attention commensurate to the occasion. Yet, it has proven to be one of the single most important pieces of legislation to be passed in our state’s history and would eventually be shown to have a much broader entanglement into another obscure international issue called the SPP or the creation of a North American Union.

Several months after the 2003 Session, agricultural groups and landowners alike began to realize the result of HB 3588, the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC), was going to disrupt their lives and their land in ways never discussed or even imagined. The “vision” of the governor became a horrible reality.

The TTC is to be a new network of over 4,000 miles of super highways built in Texas over the next 50 years. Each corridor will be four football fields wide (1,200 feet), take 146 acres per mile, and potentially affect over 900,000 Texas citizens. And, to top it all off, the state signed a contract with a foreign Spanish corporation to build the road and collect tolls for the next 50 years.
Farms will be dissected destroying their value, no access will be provided, county and utility services will be totally disrupted and rerouted, and small rural communities will literally be run over and their economies dried up. But does this matter to Mr. Perry and his highwaymen? Not really.

Coalitions formed to repeal the 2003 statute. Special nonprofit groups sprung up across the state to educate and lobby legislative members about what they created.

Then came the 2005 Legislative Session and the water boy was once again at the helm of the Transportation Committee. Mr. Krusee was asked to help landowners, but he stalled at every turn. He was deflecting the heat from leadership and thwarting the electorates demands to repeal the TTC.

Multiple bills were filed by various members to amend, slow down and study, but nothing moved. However, Mr. Krusee, once again, filed a transportation bill that now openly and arrogantly amended the state TTC statute with language that benefited Concesiones de Infraestructures de Transporte, S.A and Zachry Construction Corporation (Cintra Zachry), with which the state had already contracted to build the TTC.

Mr. Perry contended the TTC was necessary to solve the future needs of the state because our population would double in twenty years and our current system was antiquated. And, to top it all off, he had miraculously found a foreign corporation willing to pay the state billions of dollars to build our new highway system. And, oh, by the way, they will receive income for the next 50 years collecting tolls from those using their highway. What a coup - at least for Mr. Perry.

No one could say or do anything to stop the TTC. Legislative members were suddenly quiet, as if given marching orders. People who came to testify were shut out, cut off, ignored, and patronized.

All negotiations were thrown into a “working group” behind closed-door sessions and no one had the ability to lobby or affect what came out of the collective body. Agriculture organizations were effectively told to shut up, sit down, and accept what we were given. The TTC was going forward whether we liked it or not.

Finally, toward the end of the 2005 legislative session, over 30 amendments were “accepted” by the leadership, but the TTC remained in tact. In fact, the legislation gave Cintra Zachry carte blanche to move at warp speed to complete their plans, plans the state approved without seeing or knowing any of its details. And, landowners were left with condemnation hanging over their heads.

Interestingly, the state Legislature in a special-called session, attempted to right the wrongs of the now infamous U.S. Supreme Court Kelo decision that said a government entity can condemn private property and turn it over to another private entity for economic gain. Since Cintra Zachry was a private company, landowners thought this might be an opportunity to stop any taking of their private land for the TTC by amending the state statute like the Supreme Court ruling advised.

Mr. Perry realized the possibility of the state losing its ability to take land that was then going to be leased to a private corporation, so he made sure the Kelo-correcting legislation specifically exempted the TTC. Perry made sure private land could be condemned and handed over to a private company to build a toll road.

After two legislative sessions and four years passed, the truth about why the TTC was so important began to surface. In a private meeting in May of 2005, President Bush, then-president of Mexico Vicente Fox, and the then-Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin, signed an agreement implementing the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), also known as the “North American Union.”

The SPP is an agreement to merge the United States with Mexico and Canada that our Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez is pushing through his department using “working groups” to implement the plan.

There is no congressional oversight of this “harmonizing and integrating” of our countries and governments, but there is a deadline for this plan to be in place by 2010.

They are working on a broad range of issues such as e-commerce, transportation, environment, agriculture, and national security. Transportation is the first and most important step to this integration and that is the whole purpose of the Trans Texas Corridor. To have an integrated society on the ground, there must be adequate, controlled access through new mega super highways.

When all the pieces of the puzzle started falling in place, it became painfully clear that Mr. Perry had not been concerned about the needs of Texans, but the greed of multinational corporations and foreign countries needing cheap access to U.S. consumers.

It was that simple, but no one in 2003 or 2005 ever discussed or raised the issue because we were convinced this was simply the only solution to all of our future transportation needs.

We were politically diverted and hoodwinked by Perry and Dan Shelly, his former legislative aide turned Cintra Zachry lobbyist turned legislative aide again, Krusee, and an elite few in the Texas Legislature, to believe this was necessary for the future of Texas and all Texans.

Then, the smoking gun was revealed in reviewing the 2005 legislation. Buried in the bill on page 65, was Section 228.003 giving TxDoT the right to enter into an agreement with Mexico to “finance, construct, operate, and maintain a toll project.” If anyone had even thought about the bigger picture during the session, this section would have been a critical aspect of the whole debate.

It wasn’t until much later that anyone realized the connection between the TTC and this bigger transportation plan to link the world’s trade through ports in Mexico and Canada starting with the construction of a new highway system called the Trans Texas Corridor.

Perry and the rest all deny this connection, but it is an undeniable truth when the plans of the consortium of governments, corporations, and wealthy elites who are part of this “new union” building are revealed.

The Trans Texas Corridor will destroy the lives and livelihoods of individual Texas families, their land, and their homes. They are the rural few who have no political power to stop the masses from being sold a lot of hype thinking Mr. Perry is solving their future transportation needs.

It is a cold, calculated decision by our current leadership, who know their political futures lie in large blocks of votes in incorporated cities. And those of us who live in the countryside where these new super highways will be built are mere sacrificial lambs being slaughtered for greed.