Published: January 27, 2008 12:51 am
Corridor would gobble up land
Comment column
By WAYNE STEWART
The Palestine Herald

Have you ever stopped to think how big a million acres is?

I sat down to do a little calculating the other day to try and put it in perspective. It takes 640 acres to make a section, which equals a square mile. That means a million acres is equal to 1,562 square miles.

In local terms, Anderson County covers an area of about 1,077 square miles, so a million acres would be about 1 1/2 times the size of this county, or an area roughly measuring 35 miles wide by 45 miles tall.

Why the lesson on land measurement; that’s just so you know how much land the state of Texas is wanting to steal from Texas landowners.

Maybe steal is too strong of a word, because the landowners will get some money out of it when the state goes ahead with its plans of building the I-69 Trans Texas Corridor, but most are not wanting to have to sell their land just so people can get cheaper goods from China routed through Mexico.

Now just for the record, Texas Transportation Vice Commissioner Ted Houghton said this newest planned corridor is not a NAFTA superhighway, but a way to help keep Texas’ ever increasing population on the move.

Now the commissioner is right about some things. Texas is experiencing a lot of population growth and some of our roads are getting crowded, but one question I do have is, how can a road stretching from the border town of McAllen, or Laredo, all the way to Texarkana, benefit anybody but overland freight haulers?

The I-69 TTC is nothing more than a superhighway around the state’s largest population center and then a fast lane out of the state up to the future inland ports in the center of the country.

“I don’t know how this couldn’t be (a NAFTA highway,)â€