kut.org By Travis Bubenik • Jan 14, 2019
If you want to cook up a battle over private property rights in Texas, here’s the recipe:
Take a handful of sprawling cities and growing populations that are expanding into once-rural areas, add a booming oil and gas industry with a desperate need for new pipelines to move record-high volumes of hydrocarbons, and sprinkle in the new electric lines needed to power both of those trends.
In recent years, as companies and governments build more roads, power lines and pipelines across Texas, rural landowners have become increasingly familiar with – and angry about – the powers of eminent domain. Their efforts to check those powers at the state capitol haven’t succeeded, but there’s a new push on the horizon for the 2019 Texas legislative session. Here’s what you need to know about eminent domain in Texas.
Eminent what?
If you haven’t heard the phrase before, “eminent domain†is essentially the power public entities and some companies have to use private property to build something, even if the landowner doesn’t want to play along. (President Trump has talked about using that power to build his promised border wall.)
What happened last time lawmakers met?
In 2017, State Sen. Lois Kolkhorst proposed some tweaks to how eminent domain works in Texas. Her bills would have, among other things, expanded landowners’ rights during condemnation proceedings and forced pipeline companies to be more specific about their plans. The efforts ultimately died.
A bill from State Rep. DeWayne Burns would have also required more transparency from pipeline companies, and would have forced companies to pay landowners if their property, crops or livestock were damaged by the project. That bill also died.
More:
http://www.kut.org/post/new-push-eminent-domain-reform-expected-texas-legislature
