North Texas leaders plan to urge state legislators to create a statewide high-speed rail authority with eminent domain powers to support and coordinate efforts to build bullet train routes to Fort Worth, Arlington, Dallas, Houston and possibly other areas.
The creation of a Texas high-speed rail authority was among the legislative priorities discussed Thursday by the Regional Transportation Council, an independent policy group of the North Central Texas Council of Governments consisting of 45 elected and appointed officials.
The high-speed rail agency, if created, 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,” according to a draft of the group’s legislative priorities.
Eminent domain is a legal process that allows governments or companies with proper authority to take private property for a public use. The Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that Texas Central, the private company involved in the Houston to Dallas bullet train development, is considered an interurban electric railway with the power to use eminent domain. That ruling resulted from a lawsuit by Jason Miles, a Leon County property owner whose land would be bisected with a 100-foot right of way on his 600-acre tract.
The transportation council seeks to urge lawmakers to “support high-speed rail development in Texas and its superior history of safety,” according to the draft legislative priorities report. The group also wants the Legislature and the Texas Department of Transportation to review the proposed high-speed rail authority.
Regional leaders say that as the population of the Fort Worth-Dallas area booms, dedicated funding is needed to ensure the longevity of transportation projects aimed at increasing mobility and reducing congestion in major metropolitan areas. Among the proposals is whether to amend the local sales tax to exempt the portion used for transit.
Jeff Davis, chairman of Trinity Metro’s board of directors, urged regional leaders to understand that more transit options and denser housing are needed in North Texas as population estimates show the area is expected to boom to 15 million residents within 25 years.
Otherwise, he said, North Texas could have “the worst sprawl in the United States” as developers favor building in rural areas with fewer restrictions.
“Without transit, your community will be worse off,” Davis said.
North Texas efforts
A high-speed rail route from Fort Worth and Arlington to Dallas that could carry as many as 30,000 daily passengers is currently four years into a lengthy engineering and environmental review process related to the National Environmental Policy Act. The regional agency is working with the Federal Transit Administration, the Federal Railroad Administration and other state and federal agencies on the proposal. The review process could be complete by March 2025 but the council of governments has been granted some flexibility for those requirements.
In August, the Regional Transportation Council approved $1.6 million in additional funding for the $12 million study of the route that would run west of downtown Dallas to Arlington and Fort Worth.
Although Dallas officials balked at a route through the city’s downtown, regional officials want to link that route with a separate high-speed rail project underway by Amtrak and Texas Central. That project, which would include a stop near College Station, received $63.9 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration. Those funds were awarded in July as part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that the Biden administration passed in November 2021.
The revised alignment for the rail project — developed after the Dallas City Council passed a resolution in June opposing an elevated high-speed rail system through downtown and nearby neighborhoods — is still being finalized but would generally take trains west of Interstate 35 East and run mostly parallel with South Riverfront Boulevard and extend over several businesses.
The route would cross Interstate 30 from the north and avoid the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, which is undergoing a $3.7 billion expansion, before heading south to the elevated high-speed rail station at the Cedars neighborhood south of the Dallas Central Business District.
Arlington Mayor Jim Ross and Mansfield Mayor Michael Evans both said they would not support the proposed legislative item on restricting cities with no transit systems from relocating businesses from transit-oriented cities.
Otherwise, Arlington and other cities would have to join a transit agency just to “keep a business,” Ross said. Though Arlington offers some public transit options, it is the largest city in the U.S. without a mass public transit system, including bus or rail.
One proposed item, for advancing automated speed enforcement over 90 miles per hour, may conflict with state law since local authorities are prohibited from using photographic traffic signal enforcement systems, officials said.
The legislative list will be refined before it is considered for future approval by the Regional Transportation Council, possibly at the group’s Oct. 17 meeting. The group’s priorities will then be sent to the 89th Texas Legislature, which will convene in Austin in January.
Eric E. Garcia is a senior business reporter at the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at eric.garcia@fortworthreport.org.
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