Texas officials plan to use eminent domain powers to take land from private property owners, as the state moves forward with plans for its first-ever high-speed rail.
Plans are in place for a 240-mile route connecting Dallas and Houston, on which high-speed passenger trains will travel at over 200 miles per hour and help commuters complete this journey in under 90 minutes. The latest proposal would give a significant boost to the project, which has garnered both support and criticism as it moves toward completion.
The proposal was discussed on Thursday during a meeting of the Regional Transportation Council, an independent policy body of the North Central Texas Council of Governments.
According to a draft of the group’s legislative priorities, efforts to move the rail project forward will require creating a statewide high-speed rail authority.
This, they state, would require “provid[ing] counties and cities with expanded tools for land use control to preserve future transportation corridors and support land use, housing, school, and transportation connection policies that best serve growth needs.”
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The authority would “retain eminent domain authority to allow planning and development of new and/or expanded transportation corridors, including high-speed rail, commuter rail, freight rail, roadways, and trails.”
Eminent domain, according to the Texas Landowner’s Bill of Rights, is “the legal authority that certain entities are granted that allows those entities to take private property for a public use,” while providing the property owners with compensation for their land at market value.
According to Queenan Law, a Texas-based firm, while owners have the right to challenge the government’s use of eminent domain authority, in many cases “when the government comes for your property, there are processes where they can force you to sell your land even if you do not want to.”
In June 2022, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that Texas Central Railroad & Infrastructure Inc., the company spearheading the high-speed rail project, had eminent domain authority to take private property from a Leon County property owner whose land was situated on the planned rail line.
“We are disappointed in this ruling,” Regan Beck, Texas Farm Bureau’s director of government affairs, said at the time. “Unfortunately, this decision clears the way for another private company to condemn personal property using eminent domain.”
Newsweek has contacted Texas Central for comment on the use of eminent domain authority in advancing the project.
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Beyond the authority to use eminent domain, the Texas high-speed rail project has received numerous economic and political boosts in recent months.
In April, reports emerged that President Joe Biden had discussed the project with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, in an apparent effort to procure the country’s bullet train technology and bring the project closer to completion.
Last week, the federal government awarded Amtrak, the national passenger railroad company, $64 million in grant funding to move forward with the 240-mile line.
The train itself, utilizing Japanese Shinkansen technology, would reduce the number of cars travelling on Interstate 45 by up to 12,500 per day, according to Texas Central.
However, the high-speed rail project has received pushback, with some stating that its costs outweigh the funding it has so far received.
The project’s estimated cost has ballooned from $10 billion to $33.4 billion, according to a 2023 study by the libertarian think tank Reason Foundation, a figure that could rise to more than $40 billion.
The think tank said that the use of eminent domain authority will add to these costs.
“Texas Central still has not fully accounted for the cost of acquiring the land along the proposed route,” its report read. “Whether the company intends to acquire the land through arms-length transactions or eminent domain, property values have increased substantially.”
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