President's Corner
Ports-to-plains President and CEO Lauren Garduno
Werecently completed our annual conference at Eagle Pass,
Texas. I was energized by the great turnout and the diversity of topics discussed over the two days. Highlights included keynote presenters
Marc Williams, Executive Director of TXDOT, and Alex Meade III, appointed TXDOT Commissioner from Mcallen, Texas. We also heard some encouraging words from our congressional delegations up and down the corridor. And we closed with some presentations on what the future might look like on our transportation highway. Again, I want to say thank you to the City of Eagle Pass who was an incredible host. I especially want to thank Aide Castano, Homero Balderas, and Ronnie Rivera. If you missed it, too bad, so sad!! No, I was just kidding! Next year we are going to Dickinson, North Dakota. So, you have time to plan for a great event on the Theodore Roosevelt Expressway. I also want to thank our Vice President of Marketing, Duffy Hinkle, who will be retiring at the end of the year. The success of this conference is directly attributed to her. As Rascal Flatts sing, “Life is a Highway” and Duffy made good on that claim.
I do want to draw your attention to what happened in Eagle Pass and Del Rio Texas less than a week after we concluded our conference. Texas borders again received an overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants flooding and tying down our international crossings. Commerce and trade grounded to a halt as state and federal resources were diverted to handle the impossible situation. I know that if you don't live along the border, it is hard to understand this, but what happens down there costs you and me millions of dollars in lost commerce either in delays or even in damaged commodities. For example, I was speaking at a Better Borders Better America Conference last week in El Paso and we heard tragic reports of cattle carriers trying to import cattle to our feedlots in the midwestern U.S. stuck in lines over ten miles long at the Santa Teresea station. Cattle died in transit. And the sad part of this story is that the cattle crossing was not the restriction, but rather the inability for the trucks to reach the crossing.
Hold your thoughts on where we are going with this. Around this same time last week, I heard on the weather channel (farmers and ranchers watch a lot of weather) for the second time in three months a story on the impacts that the drought in the Mississippi River watershed is having on limiting the transportation of goods and commodities down the river. I know you have heard of these terms in transportation because I have mentioned them before. We need resiliency and redundancy in our transportation network. Whether it is natural disasters, social disasters, or epidemics, we need resiliency and redundancy. That is why we advocate for a new north-south interstate from the border up through Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico to Denver. That is why we advocate for a four-lane divided highway running north-south through the Midwest through Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, and Montana. That is why we advocate for more international crossings along our Texas-mexico border. That is why we advocate for a better transportation system in Mexico. The national rail carrier had to suspend operations due to the illegal immigrant issue. Isn't that incredible! Resiliency, and redundancy. Now we get the picture.
More to come …