Meetings only first phase of TTC process

January 30, 2008

By Kristin Edwards, Staff Reporter, The Huntsville Item

The Texas Department of Transportation’s town hall meetings and public hearings are the first phases required in the construction of the I-69/Trans-Texas Corridor.

Bob Colwell, TxDOT public information officer for the Bryan District, said the project could take up to 50 years and will involve several stages of planning and consultation with the public before specific locations for the corridor are set.

“Plans for the Trans-Texas Corridor are to be completed in phases over the next 50 years with routes prioritized according to Texas transportation needs,” Colwell said Tuesday. “TxDOT will oversee the planning, construction and ongoing maintenance of the corridor, although private vendors may be responsible for much of the daily operations.

“Currently, the Trans-Texas Corridor has the possibility of being a tollway which extends from Texarkana and Shreveport, La., to Mexico that is roughly 650 miles long.”

According to Colwell, the town hall meeting starting at 6:30 p.m. today at the Walker County Fairgrounds west of Huntsville is part of the first stage of discussion and information gathering for the corridor’s construction.

The public hearing, scheduled for Feb. 4, also at the county fairgrounds, will focus specifically on the environmental impact of the corridor.

“Right now, we’re in a tier one environmental impact study, and that’s what the Feb. 4 public hearing will be based on,” Colwell said. “The reason we’re having public hearings is because we want the public to come out and comment.

“We need people to tell us what is on their property, if there are any kind of historical sites or anything of that nature, because people know their property better than we do.”

After the first part of the corridor planning meetings, Colwell said TxDOT would be hosting another set of meetings and studies.

“After this meeting, then we’ll proceed to tier two, which will consist of a series of detailed environmental and engineering studies to analyze specific alignments, meaning we would be looking exactly at where the corridor would go,” Colwell said. “From there, we will determine the impacts and benefits from each alignment, and determine what litigation measures are required.

“If a no-build option is not proposed, then TxDOT will be working with individual landowners in a more in-depth study of their property to determine where the corridor would be set.”

Currently, neither a specific amount of affected acres or a list of exact areas the corridor would be built is available, Colwell said.

“In Walker County, the line it’s on runs all the way through the county to Livingston, but there are no numbers saying what amount of acres are affected,” he said. “What it is right now is a line on a map and a proposed area. We’re hoping these meetings help us narrow that area down.”

Once areas to be used for the corridor are determined, landowners will then face the possibility of having portions of their land used in the construction.

Raymond Kiser, Walker County Appraisal District assistant chief appraiser, said property owners in Texas would be affected by a decrease in actual property, not specific property value, during the corridor’s construction.

“With the construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, whatever entity is putting it in would be buying up right of way, and whatever property was in that right of way would become the property of the entity,” he said. “That means it would be taken out of the landowner’s taxable amount of property.

‘For example, if a person had 500 acres of land and 100 acres were in that right of way, those 100 acres of property would be purchased from the landowner.

“The landowner would no longer be taxed on the property value of those 100 acres, only the value of the remaining 400 acres of their property.”

When the process of determining what land will be purchased for the corridor’s construction begins, Kiser said TxDOT would be turning in a specific list of addresses affected and the property values in the affected locations.

“We would need a lot more data before we could determine which addresses are going to be affected and what areas property is going to be purchased from,” he said. “When they wanted to widen U.S. Highway 190, for example, we were given a list gathered by two or three state agencies which had all of the affected property owners’ names, addresses and property values on it.

“That information has not been gathered for us yet with respect to the construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor.”