MOTRAN Speaks
By Jack D. McNamara

The Empire strikes back!

Monday’s online Midland-Reporter-Telegram proclaimed “La Entrada planners fault opponents’ ‘scare tactics’” by staff writer Bob Campbell. The story is a rebuttal on selected points of strong expressions of opposition by Big Bend residents against the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance (MOTRAN)-sponsored four-lane highway from Lubbock to Topolobampo.

 Getting right to it, MOTRAN President James Beauchamp targeted the Big Bend Sierra Club with “falsehoods” and “inaccuracies.” Beauchamp says “particularly” the Alpine group, and denies MOTRAN has spent “millions” in lobbying.

 Really? Oil-town is parsimonious toward their pols? Perhaps Beauchamp means that the MOTRAN group specifically does not appear in the required reports of lobbying expenditures and we will leave that for further research. 

At the same time, however, MOTRAN’s Beauchamp claims credit for the $1 million federal grant to study Alpine and Marfa bypasses.

The writer Campbell early in the column attributes to MOTRAN concern that “hard-hitting” environmental groups “scuttled” plans for coal-burning electric plants in nearby Colorado City and elsewhere. MOTRAN’s Beauchamp also mourns that our local Big Bend environmentalists opposed a project in Andrews County, FutureGen, and Midland’s water supply system at Lake Ivie in Ballinger.

Toward the end of the story are several rather un-neighborly comments from Presidio County Judge Jerry Agan, previously unknown as a MOTRAN ally. Perhaps Judge Agan will expound for the local weeklies.

 The general thrust of the article is to demonize the Sierra Club and environmentalists generally and the Big Bend branch specifically. A decision by MOTRAN to meet their critics head-on, if that is what is now on the table, indicates a significant change in the ongoing adventures of La Entrada.

One change, for example, is that Henry Bonilla no longer represents either the Big Bend or Midland-Odessa in the U.S. Congress. Change also means that Texas Governor (39%) Rick Perry is losing on mega-monster corridor plans. Another change is that the Texas House of Representatives, led by Speaker Tom Craddick of Midland, lost a half-dozen Republican seats in November.

 It also means that last week the U.S. Supreme Court made a landmark, 5-4 ruling in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The ruling states, over the strenuous objection of the Chief Justice and the conservative wing of the Court, that the EPA can be sued to require it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions like those from automobiles. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion and the syllabus includes the following opening: “Based on respected scientific opinion that a well-documented rise in global temperatures and attendant climatological and environmental changes in the atmospheric concentration of ‘greenhouse gases …’”

As we always suspected it is the EPA’s job to regulate smog. Perhaps the Court’s directions to the EPA include the smog from diesel-belching 18-wheelers in high altitude desert communities like ours?

This must be a major concern for MOTRAN because they have unleashed upon us their major rhetorical blunderbuss, Ray Perryman of Waco, formerly of Odessa, publicly prominent popular economist and promoter of the obnoxious NAFTA. James Beauchamp of MOTRAN, in correcting “scare” assertions by our spokespersons, vigorously denies there will be “thousands” of trucks. Citing the ubiquitous Perryman, MOTRAN-man Beauchamp, says “there will be a peak of only 200 trucks a day” in the article.

Well, that’s a relief. Will the trucks stop for school children? We know they stop for low underpasses. If the trucks have to stop for emissions testing it may take a long time to get through Alpine. While trucks run the gauntlet it would be possible to move much more freight from Presidio-Ojinaga north on the old Santa Fe-South Orient-Texas Pacifico railroad at a much reduced cost. The railroad doesn’t run through Midland-Odessa but instead to San Angelo and Ft. Worth. That fact shouldn’t deter the MOTRAN-men and Mr. Perryman because this is, after all, an argument about the principles of “Free Trade,” isn’t it? Certainly we are not disputing about crass money advantages, are we?

We can quarrel with Midland-Odessa until the cows come home. There is a distinct difference of cultures in our two communities. But the Big Bend environmentalists are fighting for home and MOTRAN is fighting for money. This is the oldest conflict among communities and Texas is well known among Americans for boosterism. We are less well known for our environmentalism.

One of the speakers in Midland, not a resident of Alpine, tried to explain to the non-comprehending MOTRAN men that the development of the high desert Big Bend was better achieved by preserving the clean air and the open spaces. A developer himself, he alluded to the remarkable increase in land values throughout the Big Bend. Increased land values without water-mining and La Entrada, we might add.

 No matter how well intended, MOTRAN's future vision for us is inferior to our own. Mr. Beauchamp was offended by implications of “commercial traffic carrying in disease and drugs.” The deaths of pets throughout the U.S. have been attributed to a chemical melamine, in wheat gluten imported from China. And drugs? Has Mr. Beauchamp ever been to Nuevo Laredo? Or Tijuana? Or Juarez? All these were at one time vibrant and attractive Mexican communities. Each has been sequentially destroyed over the past few decades by the economic policies of the U.S., Mexico and the drug cartels.

 Of course the drug traffic will be enhanced with La Entrada. We have failed utterly to secure the border against the drug traffic and it is because we have simultaneously been promoting increased commercial traffic. You can’t have one without the other.

 MOTRAN has stated their views. They have responded publicly to our criticisms. We are not a member of the Sierra Club; but their Fran Sage replied immediately online to the article with the comment: “We welcome MOTRAN people to our town. Please come explain to us exactly, in person, what will be better for us with La Entrada al Pacifico.”  •

(Also published by the Big Bend Sentinel of Marfa, Texas April 12, 2007.)