MAP-21: Congress-Obama Expand NAFTA Superhighway Trade Corridor and Toll Road System (Agenda 21)

Some have tried to con­vince the pub­lic that the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor and NAFTA Super­high­ways are dead, never existed or are even a myth. Yet, Con­gress recently passed a new, two-year fed­eral high­way bill called Mov­ing Ahead for Progress in the 21st Cen­tury (MAP-21) that not only gives pri­or­ity fund­ing to these ‘high pri­or­ity’ trade cor­ri­dors, but also makes it eas­ier to hand them over to pri­vate multi-national cor­po­ra­tions using con­tro­ver­sial public-private part­ner­ship (P3) con­tract arrange­ments that pro­mote and enhance the tolling of Amer­ica at the taxpayer’s expense.

On June 29, Con­gress voted to pass the House-Senate Con­fer­ence Report and on July 6, Pres­i­dent Barack Obama signed MAP-21 into law. As with most bills these days, Con­gress had to pass MAP-21 in order for us to know and bet­ter under­stand what’s in it. But even then, the law­mak­ers in Con­gress don’t make it easy to fig­ure out the mean­ing of the leg­isla­tive lan­guage used in their bills. 

MAP-21 is no excep­tion, as with many of its trans­porta­tion reau­tho­riza­tion pre­de­ces­sors – the obscure and arcane word­ing being used can, like a can­cer, become a silent killer – in this case a mul­ti­fac­eted NATION KILLER – by increas­ing our $15 tril­lion debt and mov­ing our nation ever closer to North Amer­i­can eco­nomic and polit­i­cal integration.

MAP-21 spends, in just over two years, what will take ten years to pay for in tax rev­enue.  Con­gress voted for a trans­porta­tion bill that leg­is­lates a gen­eral fund trans­fer and raids Wyoming’s Aban­doned Mine Land trust fund of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. At this rate, the Con­gres­sional Bud­get Office (CBO) fore­casts that the High­way Trust Fund will run short of money by 2015.  This mas­sive over­spend­ing aban­dons the pay-as-you-go sys­tem set up by the fuel pump gas tax.

The pay-as-you-go sys­tem to finance high­way main­te­nance and con­struc­tion was soundly estab­lished under Pres­i­dent Eisen­hower in 1956 – but that endeavor had earned pop­u­lar sup­port and was widely debated in Con­gress.  There has been no such pub­lic aware­ness let alone pop­u­lar sup­port nor pub­lic debate of the NAFTA Super­high­way.  In fact, leg­is­la­tors and respec­tive admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials either feign igno­rance or claim it doesn’t exist fear­ing polit­i­cal upheaval once they admit to it hav­ing got­ten its start as the North Amer­i­can Free Trade Agree­ment was being nego­ti­ated with Canada and Mex­ico in 1990.  But sub­se­quent approval of NAFTA, in and of itself, didn’t give Con­gress even implicit author­ity to qui­etly estab­lish a North Amer­i­can super­high­way trade cor­ri­dor sys­tem, with­out pub­lic notice or debate.  But that’s exactly what’s hap­pened over the past 20 years.

The fact that America’s polit­i­cal elite – the House and Sen­ate Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can lead­er­ship over the years, as well as suc­ces­sive pres­i­dents of the United States, have qui­etly advanced the NAFTA Super­high­way Trade Cor­ri­dor and Toll Road Sys­tem, under the radar, using peri­odic trans­porta­tion reau­tho­riza­tion bills as ‘Tro­jan Horses’ to fur­ther eco­nomic inte­gra­tion among the U.S., Canada and Mex­ico, slowly robs the United States of its sov­er­eignty and inde­pen­dence, where it becomes nearly impos­si­ble for ordi­nary cit­i­zens to take any notice.  The stan­dard line the politi­cians and spe­cial inter­ests – big busi­ness and big labor – give to ‘We the peo­ple’ has become an all too famil­iar refrain such as high­way safety, alle­vi­at­ing traf­fic con­ges­tion and main­tain­ing roads and bridges that are falling apart all around us.

In the House, the MAP-21 con­fer­ence report passed over­whelm­ingly with only 52  Repub­li­cans opposed to it.  While in the Sen­ate, only 19 voted against it – all Repub­li­cans.  Not a sin­gle Demo­c­rat opposed the bill that advances three key NAFTA trade cor­ri­dors, includ­ing TTC-69/I-69, CANAMEX and Ports-to-Plains.

The state of Texas is the focal point – the main thruway for China from the Pacific Ports of Mex­ico for the NAFTA Super­high­way Trade Cor­ri­dor and Toll Road Sys­tem, accom­mo­dat­ing seven (7) of the 12 major NAFTA cor­ri­dors, uti­liz­ing three key points-of-entry at the Texas-Mexico bor­der cross­ings and fan­ning out across the coun­try, includ­ing El Paso (Camino Real and Spirit), Pre­sidio (La Entrada) and Laredo (Ports-to-Plains, TTC-35/I-35, Gulf Cres­cent and TTC-69/I-69).

NAFTA and the Superhighway of jobs exported?

Amer­i­cans have seen their jobs exported for two decades, and many argue NAFTA is what started the down­ward spi­ral.

Though most high tech jobs have gone to Asia, U.S. man­u­fac­tur­ing got out­sourced to Mex­ico, and even­tu­ally to China, too.

Even Amer­i­can agri­cul­ture is feel­ing the adverse effects of NAFTA.   You can drive through the San Joaquin Val­ley in Cal­i­for­nia even now and see signs along what used to be a boom­ing farm com­mu­nity crit­i­ciz­ing Sen­a­tor Bar­bara Boxer for using arcane envi­ron­men­tal pol­icy to destroy farm­ers’ abil­ity to grow food in order to qui­etly enforce NAFTA’s import-export mandates.

Ditto for the Mex­i­can truck­ing pro­gram that drew loud U.S. protests dur­ing the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion from truck­ers and those con­cerned with non-English read­ing dri­vers, smug­gling, and ille­gal immi­gra­tion, which Obama qui­etly approved in March 2011.

In June 2011, the Texas Leg­is­la­ture repealed the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor (TTC), a 4,000 mile net­work of multi-modal toll roads, toll rail, toll truck lanes, as well as tolled util­i­ties, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions, and pipelines of all sorts – that would all fall under the con­trol of a pri­vate, for­eign cor­po­ra­tion for a half cen­tury.

The TTC would be gigan­tic, 1,200 feet wide, which is like four foot­ball fields end to end. Dubbed the biggest land grab in Texas his­tory, it would be near impos­si­ble to tra­verse across or drive cat­tle or school buses under it, since the devel­oper only had to build over­passes where it inter­sected exist­ing interstates.

The dri­ving force behind Texas Gov­er­nor Rick Perry’s ambi­tious plan was for­eign trade – to accom­mo­date the influx of what was ini­tially thought to be goods from Mex­ico, but that soon got sup­planted by even cheaper goods from China. The TTC’s pri­mary pur­pose was to facil­i­tate the free flow of peo­ple and goods across Open Bor­ders from the deep water port, Lazaro Car­de­nas, in Mex­ico, into the inte­rior of the U.S. and up into Canada.

Tex­ans imme­di­ately real­ized the threat to state sov­er­eignty and pri­vate prop­erty rights.

They had a vis­ceral reac­tion to hav­ing their land forcibly seized by the gov­ern­ment through emi­nent domain and handed over to a for­eign entity, in this case Spain-based toll giant, Cin­tra.

The more they learned, the less there was to like.

NAFTA Super­high­ways revived

So though TxDOT announced it was pulling the plug on TTC-35 in 2009 due to strong per­sis­tent pub­lic oppo­si­tion, it scaled back the remain­ing cor­ri­dors and re-named the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor to the ‘Inno­v­a­tive Con­nec­tiv­ity Plan.’ The Fed­eral High­way Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cially con­cluded the TTC-35 project in August of 2010 by issu­ing a ‘No Action’ Record of Deci­sion. How­ever, Perry has con­tin­ued to aggres­sively push a P3 pro­gram in Texas despite the pub­lic oppo­si­tion and the expi­ra­tion of P3 con­tracts in 2009, with only a few more excep­tions granted dur­ing the 82nd leg­is­la­ture in 2011 – hence the P3s in Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW). Almost con­cur­rently, the leg­is­la­ture removed the entire TTC chap­ter from the Texas Trans­porta­tion Code in the same session.

Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor resurrected?

Right before MAP-21 gained pas­sage, TxDOT released a Request for Infor­ma­tion (RFI) on June 22 regard­ing the SH 130 toll­way, the only stretch of the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor TTC-35 to ever be built, seek­ing infor­ma­tion from poten­tial devel­op­ers to build ‘ancil­lary facil­i­ties’ along SH 130 that could include gas sta­tions, restau­rants, hotels, and rest area devel­op­ment within the highway’s right of way.

It’s appar­ent that TxDOT is get­ting into the land devel­op­ment busi­ness. This con­cept is iden­ti­cal to the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor. How­ever, Sec­tion 228.053 of the Texas Trans­porta­tion Code still gives the Depart­ment the author­ity to “con­tract with a per­son for the use of part of a toll project or sys­tem or lease part of a toll project or sys­tem for a gas sta­tion, garage, store, hotel, restau­rant, rail­road tracks, util­i­ties, and telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions facil­i­ties and equip­ment and set the terms for the use or lease.”

Leas­ing out the public’s right-of-way is hor­rific abuse of emi­nent domain that cre­ates a monop­o­lis­tic cash cow for a sin­gle devel­oper and the state of Texas. Why shouldn’t the orig­i­nal landown­ers be afforded the oppor­tu­nity to develop that land instead of the state? How can other facil­i­ties (gas sta­tions, etc.) off the toll road remain finan­cially viable when there is a monop­oly con­trolled by the state and a sin­gle devel­oper actu­ally located on the toll­way itself?

NAFTA cor­ri­dors get spe­cial treatment

So, for a time, Tex­ans thought they were finally res­cued from the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor, think­ing that if these trade cor­ri­dors ever got built, it would be done as an exist­ing free Inter­state of old – not these new-fangled ‘inno­v­a­tive financ­ing’ P3s that com­pro­mise the public’s sov­er­eignty over these crit­i­cal arter­ies. Then, on June 22, TxDOT announced its inten­tion to lease out the public’s right-of-way any­way, just like the Trans-Texas Cor­ri­dor was going to do, and on June 29, Con­gress passed MAP-21.

The three pro­posed NAFTA inter­na­tional trade cor­ri­dors that con­nect with Mex­ico and Canada that are of pri­mary inter­est in MAP-21 are:

1.  TTC-69/I-69 (from Laredo, Texas to Port Huron, Michi­gan),

2.  CANAMEX (from Ari­zona to Mon­tana), and

3.  Ports-to-Plains (from Laredo to North Dakota).

Three par­tic­u­lar sec­tions of the bill specif­i­cally advance these cor­ri­dors. Sev­eral addi­tional sec­tions pri­or­i­tize them through sec­ondary means.