Hundreds pack county meetings on border wall
Border wall protestors packed two recent county meetings to object to county commissioners allowing a wall contractor to make improvements to a remote road that would facilitate the construction of steel barriers along the Rio Grande. More than 150 people showed up to a Presidio County Commissioners Court meeting to voice opposition on April 8.
“I haven’t seen that many people at a public meeting, ever—even before I was a commissioner,” Presidio County Deirdre Hisler said of the meeting. Commissioners took no action on the item, which would have given approval or denial for contractors to reconstruct Chispa Road, a rugged stretch that winds from Highway 90 west of Valentine down to Candelaria on the border. The contractors need the improvements to move heavy construction machinery to the border.
The next morning, the crowd reassembled at the Jeff Davis County Courthouse, ready to offer their thoughts the prospect of commissioners approving a “gift from Barnard construction to reconstruct Chispa Road from FM 2017 to the Jeff Davis and Presidio County line,” a span of about 11 miles.
Jeff Davis County commissioners opted to table the acceptance of that “gift” from border wall contractor Barnard Construction in the form of road improvements. An attempt to discuss the issue again on Tuesday morning was canceled after an error was discovered in the meeting agenda.
Commissioners were expected to take no action on the item even if they did meet, since the contractor had failed to follow up with more information on their plans for the road.
Barnard Construction is based in Bozeman, Montana, and specializes in large civil engineering projects like dams and spillways. During the second Trump administration, the company has made a large amount of money on border wall contracts. In Texas alone, the company has been allocated $1.26 billion for construction in Hudspeth County, $960 million for a project mostly located in Presidio County, $600 million for a project in the Del Rio area and $369 million for the Rio Grande Valley.
Big Bend residents were poised to have their first face-to-face meetings with Barnard last week, after a dust-up on Chispa Road. After locals spotted a crew from Frontier Development staging heavy equipment in a remote corner of Presidio and Jeff Davis counties on April 1, Jeff Davis County Judge Curtis Evans and Precinct 4 Commissioner Albert Miller personally drove out to ask the crews to halt construction, and Presidio County Precinct 1 Commissioner Deirdre Hisler tried to arrange an informational presentation from a Barnard representative to keep locals and stakeholders in the loop. Contractors had told observers and county officials that the road work was intended to facilitate construction of a border wall along the Rio Grande.
Reached by phone, Judge Evans explained to the Sentinel that his county only intersects with the road at a point, but the contractors would need to improve the condition of the road to safely get crews and equipment closer to the river. He said he hadn’t seen any formal plans in writing, but that they’d talked about widening the road by a few inches and potentially adding culverts and other drainage features. “Our budget is very limited,” he said of his county, which does not have a designated road and bridge crew and has to contract any improvements with out-of-towners. “We can only afford to blade it a couple times a year.”
The public commenters at last Thursday’s meeting were united in their conviction that the county should not accept any services from Barnard. “I think this ‘gift’ is a Trojan horse,” said Scott Whitener, a former Texas Parks and Wildlife ranger who owns property in Jeff Davis County.
Mandy Roane, who attended the meeting on behalf of county landowners Baxter and Amber Box, explained that what seemed like a great deal could leave the county saddled with maintenance costs down the road. “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” she said. “Jeff Davis County will ultimately be the ones paying for this free road work, whether through long-term maintenance costs or increased strain on the county budget.”
Caiti Jackson of Terlingua was one of a handful of non-Jeff Davis County residents who made a long trek to attend the meeting out of concern that the “gift” could become a curse for residents of other communities in the Big Bend by facilitating a border wall. She was also frustrated by the lack of official confirmation from Washington about the exact details of the project. “It seems ridiculous that the contractors know more information than the residents of this county—is keeping residents in the dark a way of fast-tracking this unpopular project?” she wondered aloud. “As far as I’m concerned, if they’re going to build [the wall] against our will, they can do it commuting back and forth on our crappy dirt roads like the rest of us.”
Barnard Construction did not return a request for comment for this story.