Texas' border wall is raising concerns about wildlife, public thrift, and property rights. (Via TexasObserver)
, to dahlia hedgehog, fish-hook cacti, and peyote: rare and native plants, highly resilient species that thrive in this arid, rocky habitat with strong, nutrient-dense tuberous roots. Santore noticed a bed of large fossils that he said was from the Eocene Epoch when, over 30 million years ago, this land was at the bottom of a shallow ocean. “This is fuckin’ morbid man. Texas just does not give a fuck.
The state awarded the contract for the ranch in Santore’s video to a company called BFBC, which was among the top wall builders for Trump. The firm is getting $47 million to build the 1.75 mile segment, a rate of nearly $27 million per mile. Timothy Barnard, the founder and chairman of BFBC’s parent company, is an active GOP donor. After BFBC got its state contract last September, he cut a $5,000 check to Abbott’s campaign — his first donation to a state politician in Texas.
Abbott and TFC have publicly said that most people are willing to accept the wall on their land and that “hard no’s” are few and far between. But infrom February, the state’s program manager painted a less rosy picture: Along the first 45 miles targeted by the state, only 25 percent of landowners were participating.
“The planning here is very piecemeal and doesn’t appear to have a systematic goal, except to just show the flag and pretend that something approximating the Trump effort is still continuing,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law who specializes in government contracting. “The Trump effort had the resources of the federal government behind it. Even that wasn’t enough.
Abbott specifically ordered the wall to be built to the exact same specifications as Trump’s, so the design phase may have been a light lift. But his early promises that landowners would volunteer property and that money would flow in from red-blooded Americans nationwide have fallen flat. A crowdfunding effort Abbott launched in 2021 pulled in a little over $50 million, with 98 percent coming from a hermetic billionaire heir in Wyoming.
By spring, four of these contractors had finally begun construction on six different sites totalling close to 15 miles. “We feel the program has reached a tipping point and we are gaining significant momentum,” Richard Cellon, one of TFC’s project consultants, said at a March meeting. But the effort was still well behind schedule.
Land agents from a company called Universal Field Services, which is contracted to acquire land for the state, first contacted the retired rancher — who did not want his name used due to privacy and safety concerns — about a year ago with an offer to acquire the rights to build a border wall through his property.
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