Republican Perry a NO-SHOW: Maybe he was tied up with his " Sugar Daddy ", Dr. James Leininger !
Perry's challengers blast tollway plan at meeting
By The Associated Press
March 24, 2006
SEATON, Texas- Gov. Rick Perry's challengers in the November election took turns Friday attacking his vision for the Trans Texas Corridor, a $184 billion plan to build megahighways around the state.
Appealing to a crowd of mostly rural residents concerned about losing land to the project, Democratic gubernatorial nominee Chris Bell was joined by independent candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman as he asked the crowd to "fire Rick Perry."
More than 700 residents attended the meeting in Seaton, a town just east of Temple where the first leg of the corridor will likely be built within a few miles.
"Gov. Rick Perry and his land-grabbing highway henchmen want to cram toll roads down Texans' throats," Strayhorn said in Saturday's edition of the Austin American-Statesman.
"In a Strayhorn administration, (the corridor) is going to be blasted off the bureaucratic books."
The proposed first phase of the project, a 300-mile stretch of tollway from San Antonio to the Oklahoma border, would run parallel to Interstate 35.
Texas farmers are worried they'll lose large chunks of land and be inconvenienced if a large highway splits their property. If the corridor is 1,200 feet wide in some areas as planned, a farmer could lose as much as 146 acres per mile, according to the Texas Farm Bureau.
"We need roads, we all know that," said Bell, a former congressman. "What we don't need is to have our land taken away to benefit private business."
The panel was organized by the Blackland Coalition, which formed last year to rally opponents of the plan. To the right of Strayhorn on the stage was a placard and seat for Perry, the Republican incumbent, who was invited but didn't attend.
A board member of the coalition, Inez Cobb, said the area around Seaton went Republican in the mid-1990s but "they better watch their step or it might not be for long."
Perry's spokesman, Robert Black, didn't think opposition to the corridor plan would hurt the governor in November.
"The governor believes that the vast majority of Texans, including rural Texans, understand that with a population expected to double in the next 40 years, the current Texas infrastructure can't handle that increase," Black said. "Something has to happen."
Friedman, the author and entertainer, saved his strongest remarks for the decision to let the Spanish consortium Cintra-Zachary build and run the project.
"It's like having Dubai run the ports of America," he said. "It means we'll be paying tolls to a cowardly Spanish company for 70 years."
Outside the building, volunteers for Friedman and Strayhorn gathered petition signatures to get on the November ballot. Independent candidates for governor must collect 45,540 signatures from registered voters who did not cast ballots in either the Republican or Democratic primaries March 7.
source: http://www.reporternews.com/abil/nw_state/article/0,1874,ABIL_7974_4570054,00.html
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Political trio hits the road – and the governor, too
By Mike Anderson Tribune-Herald staff writer
Saturday, March 25, 2006
SEATON, Texas – Three gubernatorial candidates Friday night raised their voices in a chorus of opposition to the proposed Trans-Texas Corridor and the Republican governor who crafted it.
About a thousand people gathered at Seaton Star Hall, near Temple, to hear speeches by Democratic candidate Chris Bell and independent candidates Carole Keeton Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman focusing on the increasingly controversial transportation plan.
Gov. Rick Perry, who proposed the corridor in 2002 as a way to accommodate the state's projected trade and population growth, didn't attend Friday's event.
The proposed corridor would bisect Texas from the Mexican border to Oklahoma and bring together highways, rail and utility infrastructure in a 1,200-foot-wide tollway. The corridor is expected to parallel Interstate 35 and pass through McLennan County. State highway officials could announce the 10-mile-wide environmental impact study area for the corridor in the next few weeks.
Friday's program was hosted by the Bell County group Blackland Coalition, formed in April 2005 to oppose the corridor plan. Coalition chairman Chris Hammel said the group opposes the proposal in part because it would use eminent domain to acquire private property for the corridor when existing right of way is already available along I-35.
The group also objects to the possibility that a portion of the corridor passing through Central Texas could be operated as a toll road by a Spanish company, Cintra.
Rather than engage in debate, each of the gubernatorial candidates walked to the podium, discussed his or her opposition to Perry's corridor plan, then launched into other issues ranging from crime to school finance before quitting the hall.
Calling Perry's proposal "the Trans-Texas Catastrophe" and "the biggest land grab" in Texas history, state Comptroller Strayhorn said she was adamantly against the tollway project.
"Texas property belongs to Texans, not foreign companies," she said. "You cannot ask Texans to give up their land, then expect them to pay toll to drive their tractors across." Instead, she said, Interstate 35 should be expanded.
Peppering his comments with the humorous one-liners that have characterized his campaign, country-western musician and mystery novelist Kinky Friedman also expressed reservations about the tollway, including its operation by a Spanish firm.
"Folks, this is a bad idea," he said. "It's like having Dubai run the ports of America. I have an idea. Instead of the Trans-Texas Corridor, take four highways across Texas, name them after Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Bob Wills and Buddy Holly, none of them toll roads."
Friedman then talked about biodiesel fuel, an alternative fuel touted widely by Nelson.
Like Strayhorn, Bell criticized Perry for going to court to withhold details of the state contract with Cintra. He said Perry's handling of the corridor proposal has led many Texans to distrust their state government. He suggested the plan ought to be put on hold and taken to the Legislature to rework.
"I think the Trans-Texas Corridor is a product of the culture of corruption," Bell said. "Rick Perry's toll road boondoggle doesn't make any sense except for the road builders who've poured money into his campaign coffers."
Falls County resident Calvin Whatley said he was afraid the proposed corridor would cut through the farm that has been in his family 145 years.
"The main thing we are after is anything that will prevent this damnable highway," he said, adding that this included supporting anyone who could defeat Perry in the November election.
Milam County resident Stanley Glaser echoed Whatley's sentiments but said he also feared Friday night's trio of candidates will split the vote and ensure Perry's victory.
Hammel said the coalition invited Perry to speak at the event but never received a response from his campaign. Hammel said he believes Perry might have been afraid he would be ambushed by three candidates and a room full of people who oppose a project he proposed.
"If the governor came and wanted to defend the Trans-Texas Corridor, it would be our responsibility as hosts to make sure he got an open opportunity to share his views," Hammel said. "You get 1,000 people in a room, you can't guarantee someone won't give a catcall or something, but we would try to make sure that didn't happen."
Perry campaign manager Robert Black said Perry's absence was driven by pressing duties in the public school funding crisis rather than any fear of being ganged up on by corridor opponents and gubernatorial rivals.
"It's more of a situation that we are a few weeks from a special session and that is where his focus is right now," Black said. "However, this group does tend to be particularly hostile towards finding solutions to the transportation needs of Texas."
Hammel said the coalition has formed a political action committee and plans to again invite each of the four candidates to speak on separate occasions as the governor's race progresses. Based on their comments, the group will then pick one to endorse and will contribute campaign funds, he said.
Sixty-two corridor opponents contributed money to the PAC Friday night, Hammel said.
manderson@wacotrib.com
757-5741
source: http://www.wacotrib.com/news/content/news/stories/2006/03/25/20060325wactranstexas.html
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Perry's trip is a fond memory — for his foes
2 years after Bahamas powwow, school finance still on a slow boat.
By W. Gardner Selby
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, February 17, 2006
Two years ago this week, Gov. Rick Perry flew by private jet to the Bahamas to relax and chat with advisers about politics and school finance.
"The governor is a very serious scuba diver," Grover Norquist, a Washington tax cut advocate who joined Perry at Elbow Cay, said this week. "I managed not to drown."
Norquist, like others there, insisted there was ample substance to the gathering.
Perry's trip, costing taxpayers nothing except $4,000 for security, preceded by two months a failed special legislative session called by the Republican governor. The session amounted to one in a series of stalled tries by GOP leaders to reduce school property taxes and tie increases in spending to better school management and gains in student achievement.
And the trip lingers as at least a potential campaign thorn, though Perry last month dismissed an opponent's charge that the four-day retreat — with Perry's travel, lodging and meals paid for by two long-time supporters — exemplified an unholy allegiance to moneyed interests.
On Thursday, independent gubernatorial candidate Carole Keeton Strayhorn's campaign issued a press release underscoring the anniversary of the "mid-winter trip to the tropics."
In December, Democratic challenger Bob Gammage kicked off his campaign by showing a photograph of a boat he called similar to the craft employed by Perry's party. "We don't need a state government run from yachts," Gammage said. "I will make policy in the state Capitol, not in the Bahamas."
Gammage, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, is pitted in the March 7 Democratic primary against former U.S. Rep. Chris Bell and Rashad Jafer, a sales manager.
Perry later called Gammage's tack "a huge mistake. If he doesn't have any other vision for the state of Texas than to complain about somewhere I have gone, as totally and absolutely ethical and legal as it was, I think he's going be an absolute bomb as a candidate."
Perry, who's expected to call a special session on school finance after the primaries, has lately been preparing by huddling on taxes with clutches of legislators in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Lubbock and Abilene, with more to come.
John Sharp, named by Perry to lead the Texas Tax Reform Commission, said Perry hunts advice and consensus. "We don't want to show up on the first day of the session and surprise anyone," Sharp said.
Rep. Jim Keffer, R-Eastland, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, welcomes the outreach, saying: "They are not going to try to force anything down anyone's throat. That was the problem in the past, going in and breaking arms and rolling over people."
In the 2004 session, House members joined Keffer in unanimously rejecting Perry's tax proposal, portions of which were likely mulled in the Bahamas.
Perry's plan would have lowered school property taxes by raising the cigarette tax, tightening corporate franchise and auto sales tax collections, legalizing video lottery terminals at horse and dog tracks and imposing a $5 entry fee at topless clubs.
Performance carrot
The Bahamas trip, which came to light in The Dallas Morning News, involved lengthy discussions and chances for Perry to scuba dive. Norquist said he personally plunged 100 feet down, spotting sharks, barracuda and underwater caves.
Judicial Watch, a watchdog group, complained to the Texas Ethics Commission, which found that Perry didn't spend campaign funds for personal use, which would have been a violation of state law.
Perry told the panel: "I made a decision that in order to best facilitate my office's development of politically viable educational policy I would need to get together with a select group of political and technical advisors in a setting removed from daily distractions."
Along on the trip were James Leininger of San Antonio, a proponent of government vouchers enabling public school students to attend private schools, and Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the anti-tax Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Rollins recently called the locale "unusual," but said the gathering was productive. "I'll jump at any opportunity to have that kind of conversation."
Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, which champions state and federal tax cuts, said Perry came out of the trip comfortable with ideas that remain worthy of becoming law — including the view that school spending increases shouldn't happen without gains in educational accountability. Perry, he said, "took a lot of barbs and arrows from people who wanted to talk about half of it — money (for schools) without reforms. He became stronger politically because he hung tough with a good idea."
Proposals presented by Perry that year included $511 million a year for initiatives to elevate student achievement. Perry also proposed $5,000 stipends for teachers bolstering students in struggling schools.
Airing the issues
The ethics commission judged Perry's activities on the Bahamas trip — conversations touching on taxes, education, presidential politics and congressional activity — "clearly related" to his duties as a candidate and officeholder.
In retrospect, a Judicial Watchcq spokesman said, Perry still should have sidestepped letting campaign donors subsidize the trip. Russell Verney, director of the group's Dallas office, said: "There weren't enough Texans vacationing in the Bahamas at that time to justify a campaign trip. It was a personal trip, it should have been (entirely) paid for personally."
Conceding there's been no public outcry to date, Verney added: "Elections are to air issues like this and let the public be the judge."
Perry's chief political consultant, Dave Carney, suggested that the Bahamas' trip retains only two political implications. It gives Gammage "something to say," he said "and it gives the cranks something to attack, criticize and talk about without having to actually come up with a plan or an idea of their own. Negativity has never won an election."
State business better in the Bahamas?
Gov. Rick Perry and his wife, Anita, went with supporters and aides to the Bahamas for Presidents' Day Weekend in February 2004. Perry's gubernatorial challengers have derided the trip.
What it cost
•Air travel donated by John Nau III: $2,435
•Meals, lodging donated by James Leininger: $2,968
•State-funded expenses filed by security retinue (six troopers): $4,200, including:
Rental of golf carts : $180
Rental of scuba diving equipment: $226
Cell phone/phone card rental : $666
Some of those who went
•Gov. Rick Perry
•Anita Perry, first lady of Texas
•Grover Norquist, Washington tax cut champion
•James Leininger, San Antonio proponent of enabling disadvantaged public school students to attend private schools with government money
•Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the pro-small government Texas Public Policy Foundation
•John Nau III, Houston beer distributor
•Mike Toomey, then Perry's chief of staff
•Deirdre Delisi, then governor's deputy chief of staff
•Mike Morrissey, governor's budget and planning director
•Dave Carney, Perry's chief campaign consultant
Sources: Interviews, published accounts and expense reports of Department of Public Safety troopers
source: http://www.statesman.com/search/content/news/stories/local/02/17bahamas.html
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