The Trans Texas Corridor If any of you are like me you haven’t been paying much attention to the Trans Texas Corridor so you probably don’t know any more about it than I did a few weeks ago. And that needs to change, just as it did with me. Of course part of the reason you probably are uninformed regarding the TTC is because our legislature has been doing this without your knowledge and haven’t had the desire for you to know about it. Here is another reason for transparency in government, and, at least in this case we now know what they want to hide. This Trans Texas Corridor isn’t just another highway that will be a toll road. This Corridor isn’t just a highway; it is a network of highways (actually between four and eight) that will cut Texas up like a pizza. It will consist of building new highways and in some places it will encompass the ones that are already standing, and already paid for by the taxpayers of this great state. Almost any travel of any extended distance would likely mean that you would then have to get on one portion of this Corridor or another and have to pay a toll. As though the high fuel costs don’t make traveling costly enough the government seems to think we should have to pay more. Do you agree with them? I don’t. Let’s not forget that to build a new highway it takes land to build it on. So, where does the land come from to build this highway? Yes, it comes from land that presently belongs to Texans, not to the state of Texas, which will be taken from them through eminent domain and used to build this toll road through our state. And that is a total of 584,000 acres of land that Texans will lose. Now, who will be building this network of highways that will cost the Texas taxpayers $184 billion? And who will own the highway, and any businesses placed along it? While discussing the financial part of this here we must not forget that Rudy Giuliani’s law firm is working on this and he will personally make around $70,000,000 for his getting us to look the other way and allow this to go through. And, for whom is he working out this deal? A Spanish company by the name of Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. has bought the rights to build this Corridor and to charge tolls on it for the next 50 years. This is not money that is going to help Texas economy or the economy of the United States as a whole, this money is going to Spain. So, in essence they want to take our land, build highways on it as well as take over portions of highways we already paid for, and the tolls all go to Spain. Yes, this is a part of the NAFTA Superhighway that would run from Mexico all the way to Canada. Not only will this take our money, in the ways of tolls, and send it to Spain, but it will also be built as any other toll road is built, I’m sure. It will have limited exits which mean that many small businesses which now survive almost entirely from drive-by income will no longer get the necessary traffic to survive. What do you think this kind of situation will do to the economy of this great state? What do you think this does to our ability to seal our borders and keep out unwanted criminals and terrorists? Well, the answer to the first one is simple and rather obvious to me, and likely to you as well. It will do nothing but harm our economy as it will take farm land and land where businesses now sit and change it from land that makes money for our citizens and turn it into a road system we will have to pay to drive on. It will also take homes away from citizens and put them in the situation of having to find new homes with whatever small amount of money the government deemed their land and home were worth. What do they do if they can’t afford to replace their homes with that payoff? They will have to go into debt just to put a roof over their heads. The second one might not be so obvious to all but it is to me. If this Corridor is designed to allow trucks to run straight through from Mexico to Canada do you really believe the border checks are going to be more secure? I don’t. Especially as this won’t be owned by Americans so how can we be sure that the Spanish company feels the same need we do to protect our national security? They might well let anyone in that wishes to come and has the money for the tolls. That said, how can we be sure that these people won’t simply go a few miles up that Corridor and get off and stay, and what kind of control will we have over what they haul through our country and into our country? This whole thing to me is not unlike the Dubai Port Deal that our Congress overrode and shut down as they deemed it a risk to our national security. Now, rather than simply wanting to control our ports, now we are risking the very heart of our country being in the control of foreigners who, regardless of their intent, will not have the best interest of the American people first in their plans. We need to stand up against this and tell the people in charge that we don’t want this any more than we wanted to hand over control of our ports to the EAU. And the first thing you can do is say no at the primaries, and on Election Day, by making sure that those who represent us in our state Congress, as well as federal, have not agreed with this serious attack on our security, and if they have send them home to find another job. The only people who need to hold office in 2009 need to be those who will fight against handing our security over to those who aren’t Americans, and who wish to sell our highway system to make money for another country. Our economy needs to come first and any politician who doesn’t get that shouldn’t be elected now, or ever, as they aren’t representing us when they take from us to give to Spain or anyone else. |
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