Fight Looms over Construction of Huge Texas-Mexico Freeway

The talk in West Texas this summer is La Entrada al Pacífico, and it's either a great opportunity to develop an international trade route, or it's a wretched plan that would ruin the pristine and unique qualities of the Big Bend region on the Rio Grande border with Mexico. There's not much sentiment in between.

Both sides hope a study by the Texas Department of Transportation will clarify La Entrada's short- and long-term impacts. At the crux of the issue are three questions: Are the trucks coming, and if they are, how many, and when?

La Entrada's pitch goes like this. Cargo ships from Asia and overflow ship traffic from Los Angeles, Long Beach, and Seattle will put in at a deepwater port in Topolobampo, Sinaloa, on Mexico's Sea of Cortez. From there, merchandise will be loaded onto trucks and railcars and transported across the vertiginous Sierra Nevada and Copper Canyon, through Chihuahua City eastward until it crosses into the U.S. at Presidio. Then the trucks will rumble up U.S. Highway 67, through Shafter ghost town and by Chinati Peak. Past Donald Judd's concrete boxes outside Marfa, the trucks will hang a right at the town's single, blinking red light and head for Alpine, where they'll duck under a low train overpass and chug straight through downtown. A few miles out of town, it's a left turn to Fort Stockton, then on to McCamey before turning onto U.S. 385 to Midland and Odessa.

The Midland-Odessa area is known for oil rather than commercial shipping or distribution. La Entrada promoters have set out to change that. The notion of the Entrada corridor was born in the mid-1990s, when the price of crude was generally less than $20 a barrel and the Permian Basin's oil-driven economy wasn't as bullish as today. Launched by a group called the Midland-Odessa Transportation Alliance, or MOTRAN, and members of Chihuahua state's economic development department, La Entrada promised to lift northern Mexico and the Permian Basin out of economic doldrums, and diversify business and job opportunities.

Midland-Odessa may be 800 miles from the Pacific Ocean, but folks from the Permian Basin dream big. "We originally started looking at an extension of I-27 from Lubbock to Midland-Odessa," says Charles Perry, MOTRAN's founder and a current director. "It helped to anchor it with a route on into Mexico, because at that time, NAFTA had just passed, and there was a push for better connections to Mexico. The more we looked at it, the more it really made good sense."

Over the years, MOTRAN has successfully lobbied for state and federal funding to improve highway infrastructure around the basin; some of the roads are linked to Entrada's route for commercial traffic. And they're proud of the support they've had at home: MOTRAN's website prominently features a photo of then-governor George W. Bush, a Midlander, signing legislation naming La Entrada an official state corridor back in 1997. Bush was in office -- this time in the White House -- when La Entrada won its 2005 federal designation as a "high priority corridor" on the national highway system. The group helped push for federal designation of the route. Little green signs that read "La Entrada al Pacífico" dot sections of the highway.

Big Bend residents have kept a collective eye on La Entrada for years, especially because of Mexico's progress with its road upgrades. Mexico, it seemed, was eager to advance. A new bypass was engineered and built around the steep, winding Peguis mountain range between Chihuahua City and the border town of Ojinaga. Economic development and transportation officials from Sinaloa and Chihuahua told Texas transportation officials about specific plans for the Entrada route through their states. Many of those improvements still have a long, long way to go before they're completed, but dire predictions started appearing in West Texas about the anticipated increase in truck traffic on La Entrada. Freight traffic at the Presidio port of entry has risen in the last decade from 2,897 crossings in 1996 to 6,616 last year. Those numbers don't offer an accurate window into how future traffic may evolve. Traffic projections for Entrada so far are wildly variable.