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.
Read more from Travis Bubenik with KUT 90.5 here.