By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Two ranchers attended commissioners court on Wednesday and expressed their concerns about the placement of a physical border wall on their properties in the western reaches of the county.
After discussing the proposed plans for a physical border wall with commissioners and Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez, County Judge Lewis G.
county commissioners court on Wednesday that he wrote a letter to President Trump about plans
for a border wall in western Val Verde County, telling the president he will make ranchers “prisoners on their own land.” (Photo by Karen Gleason)
Owens Jr. recognized Becky Foster, who told the court she and her husband, Justin Foster, own property in far southwest Val Verde County, known as the Foster Ranch.
Foster told the court, “We have talked to some Border Patrol folks out of Washington, D.C., that, although the map shows updated, he’s still telling us that it’s undecided, which is concerning when we have a map, but I think the most important thing to tell you that I’ve heard from him most recently is that the pushback is working, and he encouraged me to continue to push back, so anything that the court could do to express our concerns for building a wall.”
Foster said she has also heard that the most current proposal is for a vehicle barrier like those used on the beaches of Normandy during World War II.
Foster said, “Of course we’re concerned because we know that we had a land surveyor/appraiser tell us that every acre of our property is worth more money because of access to the river because we go from the highway to the river, so if we do not have access to the river, every acre that we own now loses value. Water is life in West Texas. If we lose water access, there is obviously a significant concern for the future of our operation.”
Foster said a representative of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told her Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “has some influence on this,” and “any communication that we can give to the governor discouraging this action would be good.”
After Foster finished, Owens said, “Let’s do this: Just like we did with everything else, the power line, send a letter from the county judge, if you all are okay, stating that we would rather not have it, whether it would be a vehicle barrier or a wall. That the citizens and the landowners don’t want it, and we’ll do what we did with the last one. We’ll send it to our state and our federal representatives and the border coalition of county judges.”
Commissioner Pct. 3 Fernando Garcia asked if the court could task the federal lobbying consultants the county had engaged with following up on the issue, and Owens replied the county could, as soon as it sent the consultants a check for their services.
Foster added, “The only other thing that I would mention to you is there is a contractor that, from our understanding, has not been awarded anything yet, and continues to contact landowners in our area, in western Val Verde County, to try to access roads in the area. I will say when I told the Border Patrol person in D.C. about this, he said, ‘I took it to leadership,’ and they were angry with the wording that had been used with some of our neighbors, like ‘if we can’t do this the easy way, we will do it the hard way’ or ‘we will get access, one way or another.’
“So this Border Patrol representative expressed to me that I have absolutely no obligation as a landowner to let him on my property until we have signed things in place, but I think it’s important for everyone to know the threatening demeanor that’s being posed from contractors who don’t even have a contract yet for work in the area,” Foster said.
Owens said, “And like the sheriff just said, the contract that’s going to be awarded is going to be for the design, and, again, nothing’s been awarded.”
Commissioner Pct. 4 Gustavo “Gus” Flores said one of the problems with the proposed wall is that in many tracts of land, both large and small, a physical wall would split ranches in two.
Foster said, “If it would be where they say it would be on the map, we would lose hundreds of acres. When it was going to be the 30-foot wall, we were told there would be gates, but they’re $2 million apiece, and they’ll be spread a few miles apart, so you could have a fence that you would take your sheep through, run them down the access road the two miles to the next gate, bring them back through and run them back down your property and let them out again.”
Owens commented, “It’s always on the verge of ignorant.”
Owens thanked Foster for her time and recognized another county rancher, Patrick Zuberbueler.
Zuberbueler told the court, “My family has been in Val Verde County since the 1880s on both sides of my family. So if you follow the river from due south of Comstock all the way to Seminole Canyon, that’s family property. West of the Pecos River, that’s more property. I very much appreciate what Mrs. Foster is saying. . .
“I got a phone call myself from someone who was, like, basically, ‘we’re going to come on there; we’ll find a way.’ I let him leave a message. I never called him back. But other family members – and the ranch is in several family members’ hands – were all getting various phone calls and to Mrs. Foster’s point, I got on the phone with Rep. (Eddie) Morales’ office in Austin and part of the message that I received through all of this: Because the pushback that Mrs. Foster talked about, it was almost like they were taking a stance of ‘let’s just be a little more delicate, but we’re still going to push ahead and get this project done and we’re going to have it done before the current administration leaves Washington,’ so we’re talking about roughly a two-year period,” Zuberbueler said.
The rancher added, “I actually wrote President Trump. Maybe a moot point, but I was a little bit irritated, and I (told him), ‘You have made us prisoners in our own land, the land of freedom, the land that we’ve had in our family for over 140 years.’ . . . You all know the geographics of Val Verde County. It’s impossible to do something, even with today’s technology. When you talk about razor wire, when you talk about we’re going to build a bridge to keep this moving and that moving, a $2 million gate, a $30 million bridge, to your point, judge, that doesn’t make any sense.
“I came today to hear what you had to say, but also how can we run faster, smarter, like, what can we do as landowners, because it affects a lot of people within the county, so if you take through the course of time, my family’s lost land to a new Highway 90. They lost land to Amistad Lake, back in the ’60s, Seminole Canyon. We’re constantly getting smaller, smaller, smaller, and we all know what it takes to operate a ranch. When you say you have 30,000 or 40,000 acres, it’s really not a lot of land in Val Verde County.
“I’m here today to kind of express my frustration. Everything we hear, every week, every other week, is a little bit different story, and it’s a little bit frightening. It’s a little bit frustrating, it’s a little bit scary to me, as a landowner, how it’s almost like ‘sorry, but you don’t have a choice anymore.’ That’s where we stand,” Zuberbueler said.
After the two ranchers spoke to the court, Owens called for a vote to allow him to send a letter to the county’s elected representatives, which passed unanimously.
Owens also asked any other landowners who are receiving threatening calls from supposed wall contractors to call him or any of the commissioners.
The writer can be reached at delriomagnoliafan@gmail.com
