The news for Hidalgo County has been good. In a study released last month, federal highway consultants concluded that both interstate routes to the Valley could be economically justified, and should be built.
Not that any part of Texas is being overrun by trucks from Mexico yet. Anticipating the river of trade from NAFTA, in 1993 the Texas Highway Department began measuring truck traffic along 20 different routes from Mexico inside the Texas border. The Valley routes showed an average increase of seven to eight trucks a day, hardly enough traffic to justify building a new interstate highway. But carrying capacity is not what building I-69 is about. I-69 is about jobs.
And if a congressman's brother needs one so that Texas can bring more jobs and more highways, few people are going to be upset. When Ralph Nader's Congressional Accountability Project tried to find members of Congress to sponsor its ethics complaints against Tom DeLay, it had to find retiring members to sign the letter.
Gary Ruskin, the director of Nader's outfit, says the DeLays' relationship "looks like influence peddling to us, and that's very bad for a democracy. Democracy ought to be run by votes and not by the purchase of influence by corporate and wealthy elites."
Ruskin, who has also filed a complaint about the relationship of Shuster and Eppard, has been particularly critical of the House Ethics Committee's delay in acting on the complaints.
"It's been 15 months and we don't even have an investigation started," he says. "That's outrageous, and shows how poorly the Ethics Committee serves the American public."
There is some opposition to the NAFTA highway from the Coalition Against NAFTA Highways, a consortium of environmental groups that includes the Coalition for a Paving Moratorium, the Sierra Club and the Fossil Fuels Policy Action Institute. These groups want Americans to cut back on driving and new highway construction. Federal studies indicate that I-69 will pass through some of the South's most precious wetlands, and much environmental work will have to be done to avoid destroying them. The Coalition Against NAFTA Highways is sending one of its leading speakers across the country to speak out against the NAFTA highways this month. He's bringing his guitar.
He's not likely to turn back the economic steamroller that is headed his way. The NAFTA highway is all but a done deal. Randy DeLay is just one of the first of the underemployed to benefit from it. And what goes around comes around. Now that he's a solvent businessman again, last year he contributed $4,000 to Bud Shuster's campaign and nearly $24,000 to Tom DeLay's campaign and political action committee.
Not that everything is going his way. In his recent federal lobbying filings, Randy DeLay indicates that seven of his nine clients are "inactive " and not paying him a dime. His only currently active client on the federal level seems to be the Valley towns of Hidalgo County.
But his Austin lobbying filings show that Houston Industries, owner of Houston Lighting & Power, has him on the payroll at between $50,000 and $100,000. "You don't see many Houston-based lobbyists with the state and national connections that he has," says Bruce Gibson, senior vice president for governmental affairs at Houston Industries.
No indeed, and it's amazing how quickly they fell into place. It looks as though Randy DeLay has finally found his niche. Last year, he got rid of what must have been a nagging reminder of his failed business life before he became a bigtime lobbyist. He donated his 1988 Cadillac to Tom's favorite Sugar Land charity.
