Road Freedom | UK Column Interviews

Mark Anderson (0:08)

And welcome to another UK Column interview from me, yours truly, Mark Anderson, US-based correspondent for UK Column News. I hope you enjoyed my last interview with James Perloff. That got quite a response. Now today, we're getting into some really key issues in the US that also have reverberations in the UK.

And I've been a journalist for about 40 years. And I've worked with and seen and covered a number of activists and lobbyists and whatnot, and it's difficult to find someone more dedicated and resilient and often very highly effective than Terri Hall of San Antonio, Texas. She's my guest today.

And the issues she's been covering since the early days with the San Antonio Toll Party are issues that you don't often hear in the international news. So in that sense, this is a very fresh report for the UK Column viewers. And we're going to be talking about a little bit of history that has to do with NAFTA, super highways and the tolling of freeways, things like that. And also kill switches on vehicles, foreign commercial drivers licenses and the problems there. And a really big, huge issue, driverless rigs that weigh 80,000 pounds or more, things like that. And the link of all this, the association of all this with the data centers we see popping up all over the place.

And so with that introduction and that cornerstone laid, I'd like to welcome Terri Hall to this show. How are you doing, Terri?

Terri Hall (1:52)

I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.

Mark Anderson (1:55)

Yeah, I've watched what you've been doing over the years. I think you still meet in San Antonio on occasion at Chester's Burleson.

I remember going there in 2008, and I was fumbling with the new video camera I had. I barely knew which end was which. But even then, you had a lot of leadership qualities and you really knew how to corral the troops and get everyone thinking on the same page and really be highly effective at the Texas Legislature in Austin. And now in more recent times, you do journey from time to time to Washington, DC, where you've had communications with congressmen like Chip Roy and until recently, a congressman Thomas Massey of Kentucky.

Anyway, that's an interesting branch out you've done there in recent times, but let's start with just a little bit of history. I know you're a home school mom and you got a lot on your plate at times, but give us just a quick synopsis of the early days and then we'll get into these very pivotal issues. You started with the San Antonio toll party that became Texans for toll free highways. There's another organization, Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. You've founded and kind of led these organizations, but give us a little snapshot of the early days, the good old days with the NAFTA Superhighway, and then we'll quickly fast forward to these other issues.

Terri Hall (3:24)

Sure. So back then in 2005 timeframe, we caught wind of the really the big leg of the NAFTA Superhighway was along the I-35 corridor. They were basically going to build this is when I say they, I mean the Texas Governor Rick Perry at the time and his highway department, which is called TextDOT here. We're planning to build a parallel highway to I-35, which is the main artery, north-south through Texas. And it was going to be toll rail, toll road, toll pipelines, toll everything, telecommunications, all of that. And it was going to be in the hands of a foreign company. Well, you can imagine how that doesn't sit well with Texans. They don't want their infrastructure in the hands of foreigners. So and that still is very unpopular, as we probably saw in recent years in a legislative session, where we did a China land ban, basically is what the name of that bill was.

So it doesn't sit well with Texans. And we knew that instinctively, even though I'm a transplant from California to Texas, I've been here over 20 years. And almost the entire time, as soon as my feet hit the ground, we came here in 2004

By 2005, I was already active in the Texas legislature. So that tells you a little bit about what I was doing. And that was back when I only had five kids. I've had five more since then in Texas. We have ten kids and I do home school them. So it's not like I have a bunch of free time on my hands. This really was about, in our view, an existential threat to what was happening to our freedom to travel. And when a foreign entity can get control of your public infrastructure, I think it goes in large part without saying. But that means that that toll rate is no longer in the hands of the taxpayer, in the hands of we the people. So now we can't control or exert pressure if that toll rate goes sky high, which is exactly what's happened, by the way.