The Trans Texas Corridor

Ahhhh, the many webs we weave. How many of you have sat out on your front porch and sipped on a nice cup of coffee? While doing so, listened to the world wake up. Birds chirping. The faint sound of a dog barking. Leaves moving around with the sound of water washing up on a shore. Have you ever looked really hard at a spider web? They look like intricate highway systems. Outer loops with diagonal feeders all around.

Well, let me ask you this, have you ever heard of the Trans Texas Corridor? If not, I strongly encourage you to look in to it. At the end of this blog, I will give you some links for you to do your own investigation should you choose to do so.

Not many people are keeping up with the Trans Texas Corridor because TxDOT and the many special interest groups and politicians don't want you to keep up with it. If you did, this would have been shut down many years ago. But kinda like how a spider builds it's web at night, so does the politician. The Trans Texas Corridor is the brain child of Governor Rick Perry. You hear people say "...things are bigger in Texas." Well, let me just try to begin to tell you how BIG this Trans Texas Corridor really is. It will have 10 vehicle lanes, 6 big truck lanes in each direction, 6 rail tracks, utilities, pipelines all that stretch a 1/4 mile wide for a total of 4,000 miles and taking away one million acres of land. The four Priority Corridors are described as being built (1) parallel to I-35/I-37 and the proposed I-69 from near Denison to the Rio Grande Valley; (2) along the path of I-69 from Laredo around Houston to near Texarkana; (3) parallel to I-45 from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to Houston; and, (4) parallel to I-10 from near El Paso to near Orange. These four Priority Corridors alone total 4,000 miles. Together with the additional corridor routes identified in the Crossroads of the Americas: The Trans Texas Corridor Plan the corridors could total 8,000 miles or more. This is just the start. Texas will launch this project that is expected to continue north into Oklahoma, Kansas, and one day, Canada. This is the ground work that makes NAFTA a reality.

Two companies at this point are the brains of this project. Those companies are Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte SA of Spain, one of the worlds largest developers of toll roads, and Zachry Construction of San Antonio. Here is where it gets really good! Guess what law firm is on the side of Cintra? It's a law firm that was once called Bracewell & Patterson based out of Houston. The law firm is now called Bracewell & Giuliani. As in former mayor Rudy Giuliani. The firm's managing partner, Patrick Oxford of Houston, is the national chairman of Giuliani's presidential campaign. A former University of Texas System regent appointed by then-Gov. George W. Bush, Oxford has strong ties to many of Texas' top political leaders. He raised $100,000 for Bush in his 2000 presidential run, served as co-chairman of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's re-election campaign last year and is treasurer for Sen. John Cornyn's current re-election campaign. And just take a stab at who is one of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's top 20 contributors. You guessed it, Bracewell & Giuliani. Because Texas' primary comes late in the lineup of nomination contests, the state's role in the nomination is primarily that of money generator. Giuliani's campaign finance chairman is Roy Bailey, a former finance chairman of the Texas Republican Party. Dallas billionaire T. Boone Pickens and Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks are major fundraisers. Giuliani had raised $3.69 million in Texas as of July 30, 2007, the most of any presidential candidate. Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton was second with $2 million. Among Giuliani's Republican rivals, Sen. John McCain has raised $1.79 million from Texas donors and Mitt Romney has raised $1.76 million. Giuliani has also developed a bond with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whom he helped win re-election last year. That groundwork could make Perry a high-profile ally in Texas, although the governor hasn't yet endorsed a presidential candidate. Bracewell & Giuliani's political action committee gave $10,000 to Perry a year ago, just a few weeks before his re-election. Perry and Giuliani have talked in person and by telephone several times and have a good relationship. Bracewell & Giuliani represents a business consortium involved in the Trans-Texas Corridor, a costly, high-profile toll road pushed by Perry and opposed by farmers and ranchers.

Landowners say they worry that fields and farmhouses in Texas families for generations would be bulldozed for the highway. The state acknowledges some private land will be taken, but Perry said new roads are needed to handle Texas' growing population and trade.

The consortium sued Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott last year to keep parts of its development agreement with the state secret, saying the information was proprietary. The Texas Department of Transportation took the unusual step of siding with the consortium in the lawsuit against Abbott, whose office had ruled the agreement should be made public.
The transportation department and the consortium dropped the lawsuit last October and agreed to release the contents of the contract.

But the lawsuit further fueled concerns about foreign ownership of a major Texas highway, and the project continues to be criticized by conservative groups like the Eagle Forum and the John Birch Society, who see it as part of an international conspiracy to create a North American Union. The conspiracy theory has also provided fodder for cable television commentators like CNN's Lou Dobbs.

Scott Segal, a Washington-based Bracewell & Giuliani partner in charge of its government relations division, said Giuliani was not involved in the Texas toll road legal work and that the law firm doesn't lobby on behalf of Cintra Zachry.

"Mayor Giuliani has had no association or has done no work for the Cintra Zachry venture," Segal said.

Black, Perry's spokesman, said he doubts Perry even knows that Giuliani's firm has represented the transportation companies in connection with the project.

"The governor does not concern himself with who Rudy Giuliani's law firm may or may not represent," Black said.

Now, after reading all of that, I believe that there is something very fishy going on in Texas politics. For one, it is very hard to get State Officials to admit that they even voted for the Trans Texas Corridor. After getting "back lash" from the citizens of Texas, most have now changed their stance on the Trans Texas Corridor. I do think it's a little odd that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) found a loop hole in Congressman Duncan Hunter's double layer fence and put a stop to it. I also find it odd that Bracewell & Giuliani is one of her biggest contributors. If the above is true and Gov. Rick Perry didn't know that Giuliani's law firm was involved, then he is not fit to be the Governor of Texas. If he didn't know, WHY didn't he know?

Again, the webs we weave. If you would like more information on this project, feel free to go to http://www.corridorwatch.org/ and you can also find the state's propaganda on http://www.keeptexasmoving.com/index.php/trans-texas_corridor I would encourage you to check both of them out. Even if you don't live in Texas, this too, will affect you in some way.