Everyone PLEASE Read!!!!!!!

[RingMaster4x4]

I don't know how many of you have heard about this but I thnk this is going to be a very bad thing so I am going to post this every where I can.

TransTexasCorridor-35
is a 600 mile TOLL ROAD begins in Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley, travels east 150 miles to enter the Blackland Prairie between Corpus Christi and San Antonio, then turns north and continues through the Blackland Prairie all the way to Oklahoma.

The contract for the 1st section (316 miles) was signed March 11, 2005. This section travels from San Antonio to Oklahoma and runs east of and roughly parrallel to I-35. Construction is estimated to take 5 years, and completion is scheduled for 2010. TxDOT has not announced the exact route, but rather has identified three 10-mile wide swaths that may contain the new TOLL ROAD.

TTC-35 is ¼ mile wide (1320 feet), contains 10 traffic lanes, 6 rail lines and a zone for utilities. It has no access roads, just a fence. Each MILE of this corridor will consume 145 acres of private land. Bell County alone will lose 5,200 acres of private land. TTC-35 will destroy 50,000 acres of cropland. It will cut off and dead end thousands of Farm to Market and Ranch to Market roads. Since each overpass costs 15 million dollars, TxDOT has said they will not be built unless traffic flow justifies them.

The State of Texas will seize 150 sections of private land for this road. That is 96,000 acres of TEXAS that will be given to a foreign company (Cintra) for 50 years.

Cintra has contributed $800,000.00 to your elected officials as campaign contributions.

Cintra submitted an unsolicited bid for this contract.

Cintra is making an up front payment of 1.2 billion dollars to the State of Texas.

TTC-35 is a Trans Texas Nightmare. It will disrupt the lives of thousands of Texans. It will have a devastating effect on the agricultural economy of Texas. It creates a loss of revenue for the tax base of every county it passes through. (There are no taxes on State land.) It hurts schools by causing a loss of tax base and a change in district boundaries. It hangs the TOLL TAX MONSTER around the neck of two generations of Texans for the next 50 years.

Please call, write, or E-mail your county, state and federal elected officials. Tell them NO! No more selling of our Texas to the highest bidder and no more toll roads.

Please check www.CorridorWatch.org for more information.

The Blackland Coalition will hold a Rally/Meeting at the Star Hall on Hwy 53 in Seaton, Texas, (east of Temple) on June 3rd at 7 PM to educate and protect Texans.

Mr. Barron and Mr. Adler are two of the most highly respected eminent domain attorneys in the State of Texas. They will speak on methods landowners can use to protect themselves when forced to give up your land to the state.

There will also be several other speakers to help educate the public. Please join us. This meeting is open to the public. There is no charge for admission. Come early for a seat. The building capacity is 700; however, there will be loud speakers in the parking lot.

Ralph Snyder
Blackland Coalition

PM me or post here if you need more INFO

 

[RingMaster4x4]

Texas Prepares To Build 4,000 Mile Toll Road System
USA Today | March 8 2005

Texans are known for doing things in a big way. But the state is planning a futuristic highway system that's gargantuan even by Texas standards: 4,000 miles of expressways, mostly toll lanes.
The Trans-Texas Corridor, almost a quarter-mile wide, would carry cars, trucks, trains and pipelines for water, oil, natural gas, electricity and fiber optics. The roads would be built over the next 50 years at a cost of up to $185 billion, mostly with private money.
The network eventually would crisscross the state, diverting long-distance traffic onto superhighways designed to skirt crowded urban centers. Trucks and trains carrying hazardous materials also would use the highways.
The state's goal: relieve some of the nation's worst traffic congestion, fed by Texas' booming population and the exchange of goods with Mexico that has been accelerated since 1994 by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Gov. Rick Perry, creator of the Trans-Texas Corridor, calls it a "visionary transportation plan" that could become a national model. Perry touts it as the USA's most ambitious transportation project since President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress launched the interstate highway system in 1956.
"We looked at our interstate system and thought, 'This system is 50 or 60 years old.' At the choke points in our cities, it has basically reached the end of its useful life," says state Rep. Mike Krusee, an Austin Republican and author of the legislation authorizing the corridor. "We thought it was time for us to think 50 years in advance."
But criticism is rolling in from farm groups, environmentalists and some local politicians, targeting the project's proposed route, width and financing - and even the need for it.
"We think it's financially ... irresponsible," says Dick Kallerman, transportation issues coordinator for the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club (news - web sites). "We're a sprawl state. The whole state should be making efforts to build in more compact ways."
The state is holding 640 public meetings, and initial federal approval is expected in the spring of 2006.
A private consortium led by the Spanish firm Cintra has been selected to build the first segment, a 316-mile, $7.2 billion toll road that would roughly parallel Interstate 35 from Dallas to San Antonio. The precise path has not been determined but initial plans put it 30-50 miles east of I-35.
An I-35 parking lot
I-35 between here and San Antonio is one of the most crowded, deadly stretches of interstate in the country. More than 210,000 vehicles a day - many of them 18-wheelers - travel along the portion that runs through Austin, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. That number is projected to grow to 234,000 in 2030 and 320,000 in 2050.
The metropolitan areas linked by I-35 - also including Dallas, Fort Worth, Waco and Laredo - are home to about half of Texas' 22.5 million people. "In the next 20 years, we'll add 9 million more, and about half of them will also live in that corridor," says Robert Nichols, one of five members of the Texas Transportation Commission overseeing the project.
Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the plan: Private contractors would bankroll and build the highways, then charge tolls for up to 50 years. The contractors would rent the right of way from the state. Highways traditionally have been financed by federal and state governments.
This way of paying for roads is the wave of the future, says Tim Lomax, a research engineer at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University who studies national traffic congestion and commuting.
Mary Peters, head of the Federal Highway Administration, says a $284 billion transportation bill pending in Congress gives state and local governments more flexibility to use toll roads. "Giving drivers a choice between sitting in congestion or spending about what it takes for a good cup of coffee helps people who need a quick route to work, their errands or a child's ballgame, and it helps free up traffic for everyone else regardless of which lanes they choose," she says.
Farmers, ranchers object
Not all Texans buy this vision of the future. Among them:
• The 385,000-member Texas Farm Bureau opposes the project, saying it would consume 140 acres of prime farm- and ranchland per mile. "If the corridor splits your farm right down the middle, how do you get farm equipment from one side of the corridor to the other?" asks Steve Pringle, the bureau's legislative director. "You might have to go 20 or 30 miles one way or the other to get across." The farm bureau is supporting legislation that would cut the highways' width by 40% and require an exit for every state highway and local road.
• David Stall founded Corridor Watch to monitor the project and says it has "hundreds and hundreds" of members in 133 of Texas' 254 counties. "It's not being taken on as a transportation project, it's a revenue scheme," he says. The state can condemn private land for the corridor, then sell or lease it to private businesses such as gas stations or restaurants. "There was no traffic study that says any community was clamoring for a project like TTC."
Like other opponents, Stall acknowledges that Texas has traffic problems, but he says this is the wrong way to fix them. "It's being rammed through," he says, "and the people of Texas don't know what it is."
• Some environmentalists oppose the corridor because they believe the demand for it will fade in coming decades. "The age of cheap fuel is over," says Kallerman of the Sierra Club. "Expensive fuel will mean fewer vehicles. People will find alternatives. If they turned TTC to just rails, the Sierra Club would stand up and cheer."
• Communities along I-35, including Dallas, Laredo and others, have formed the River of Trade Corridor Coalition, worried that the project would siphon thousands of trucks off I-35. They want the truck and car lanes built within 3-5 miles of I-35, says Dallas City Council member Sandy Greyson, who chairs the group.
"If it's 30 to 50 miles out, it would just devastate the cities and towns along I-35," Greyson says.
Take Pearsall, a town of 8,000 between San Antonio and Laredo. It's partnering with a local company to build a truck stop that could generate $100,000 a year in sales tax revenue for the city, City Manager Albert Uresti says. That's a sizable chunk in Pearsall's $6 million annual budget.
"Since NAFTA, we've done a lot of investing along I-35," Uresti says. "If you build another road parallel to this road, it's going to have devastating consequences. The tax base will be hurt. Jobs are going to be lost. I just don't see a big need for it. Maybe you need it around Austin, but to build a second road here doesn't make sense."

 

[2High4U]

Must be getting ready for the North American Union where Mexico and Canada become part of the US and our civil liberties will be gone. The new currency will be the Amero =oX