Texas property owners across nine counties in the path of the planned bullet train between Dallas and Houston are demanding to know whether it’s on track or derailed.
In a letter submitted by their attorneys, 93 property owners accuse Texas Central Railway of having already abandoned the project, KBTX reports, and want the developer to admit it. “Our clients and all other impacted landowners have suffered long enough,” the letter says.
The $30 billion transit project has been on hold since a 2019 legal challenge by a Leon County property owner over the company’s authority to use eminent domain to take land for the railway. By this year, the project had gone so cold that Texas Central’s president and CEO Carlos Aguilar resigned in June amid reports that most of the company’s management team had already left. Richard Lawless, who had been chairman emeritus, said the board disbanded that same month.
Then, just days after Aguilar’s resignation, the company won its appeal of the eminent domain challenge at the Texas Supreme Court, jolting the project back to life.
Texas Central is now reportedly “repositioning” itself and has not given up on the project, but it has no executive leadership (it’s currently being managed by an outside consultant) and is in what the landowners’ letter calls a “hibernation phase in search of financing.”
The letter points out that the company’s hotline formerly reserved for landowner inquiries has been disconnected for months, and that Texas Central is delinquent on its property taxes in all nine counties where it’s holding land for the railway. Certified letters sent to the company’s offices from local tax authorities seeking payment have been returned as “undeliverable.”
Read more
Development
Dallas
JMJ’s Tim Barton losses Turtle Creek property in court
The letter also lists twenty questions they say landowners and the general public deserve the answers to, including who is running the company, the company’s financial status and what will happen to the land the company has already acquired if the project falls though. The attorneys also stated in the letter that if their questions are not answered they plan to seek a Rule 202 deposition to investigate and potentially pursue legal action.
“We do not intend to relitigate the eminent domain issues the Texas Supreme Court recently decided, the letter reads. “Rather, we intend to investigate, based on the facts and circumstances as they exist today, whether Texas Central is, in fact, planning to construct and operate an interurban electric railway.”
— Maddy Sperling