The Unholy Trinity Incident
An unlikely combination of Wallaceites, Republicans and environmentalists deals a death blow to Dallas' seaport dreams. Breathe easy, Houston.
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When the Trinity project came up for congressional hearings in the mid-1960's, Fritz paid his way to Washington to testify against it. He talked of the beautiful spots downstream from Dallas, where hardwood forests left in the floodplains support plant communities and more wildlife than on upland areas. Below Lake Livingston, the once-putrid water is almost clear as it courses between white sand banks and passes through portions of the Big Thicket.
Fritz lost that battle, but he didn't give up the war.
By 1971, Jim Bush had gone on to Navarro County Junior College and began to think more and more about the proposed canal. He didn't like what he heard; he thought about the river he had enjoyed as a youngster, and what the proposed canal would do to it.
He saw it as a great gouge through forests and farmlands, leaving much of the old river bed that he knew cut off from its sustaining flow. Bush decided that instead of dredging and straightening the river and scalping its forested banks to make a watery highway to Dallas for barge traffic, efforts should be directed at cleaning up the river and restoring it to a condition that other youngsters, years in the future, could enjoy as he had.
Bush put together a group of students at the college to oppose the canal. They met that year with Mrs. Mary Wright, one of the leading Sierra Club members in Dallas. They shared their information about the river, and pondered the devastation to the ecology of the Trinity River that the canal would bring.
In the early spring of 1972, James F. White, a theology professor at SMU, hunched over his desk figuring up his income tax. He read the results of his unhappy computations, and figured he was working one day a week just to pay taxes. It is time, he decided, to cut down on all that pork-barrel boondoggling and wasteful federal spending that Richard Nixon talked about.
White decided that he had one such boondoggle almost in his back yard: the proposed Trinity canal.
Don Smith, a young economics professor at SMU, puzzled over the cost accounting that had been applied to the Trinity project. Smith sports a mustache, owns a canoe, enjoys the outdoors, and wants to get his money's worth out of his tax dollars.
He figured that the canal project would be economically profitable only if it were computed at the old rate of 3.5 per cent return on investments. If the Corps of Engineers calculated the benefits on the premise that the canal must return 10 per cent on its investment, as private industry computes its cost-benefit ratios, then the project would yield only 60 per cent of its original cost.
Henry Fulcher, a Dallas businessman and a Republican, thought government ought to be run on a basis that would provide the best possible return on government investment in public projects. He decided that the Trinity canal project was not wise economically.
On April 13, 1972, most of those people met at Don Smith's house, and formed an organization called Citizens Organization for a Sound Trinity (COST). They decided to do what they could to oppose canalization of the Trinity in Congress, where the project was coming up for funding consideration.
Just a handful of people, really, feeling sort of lonely in their opposition to a project that had been taken for granted as being good for Dallas, and which, with all its backing, seemed inevitable.
What the hell, we'll give it a try.
In the spring of 1972, Mrs. Wright met a young man named Alan Steelman at a Republican Women's Club gathering in Dallas. Steelman was seeking the Republican nomination in May to run against incumbent Congressman Earle Cabell in November.
Mrs. Wright told Steelman about the Trinity River, and about the proposed canal, and what it would do. Steelman listened—and nodded his head.
In 1964, Cabell had resigned as Dallas mayor to run a winning race for Congress, with one of his major pledges to bring the canal to Dallas. In 1972, he returned for his biennial endorsement by Dallas voters in his much-shrunken Northeast Dallas district. He was still, he said, 100 per cent for the canal.
Steelman had begun during the spring Republican primary to wonder aloud whether a bigger Dallas was necessarily a better one, and, after conversations with Mrs. Wright and others, whether Dallas needed barge transportation when the massive new regional airport between Dallas and Fort Worth was to begin operation in 1973. Heavy transportation is for heavy industry, Steelman said, which means pollution and crime. Steelman won the Republican nomination.
Steelman dubbed the project a "billion-dollar ditch."
Even with candidate Steelman on board, the opposition to the canal was still just a handful of relatively unknown people. Most Dallas residents didn't pay that much attention to it. The canal seemed one of those things that would probably be built, since everyone more or less assumed all along that it would.
But in October, at a hearing of homeowners fighting the Corps-planned channelization of Garland's Duck Creek, Trinity River Authority manager Brune let it slip that there would have to be a local bond issue to provide starter money for the canal.
The canal was now going to cost $1.6 billion. But to show their good faith, and interest, as well as to account for their expected benefits, the 17 counties along the river were going to have to put up $150 million in seed money. Ten per cent down, and Uncle Sam would pick up the rest.
But it was the first time that citizens in Dallas knew that the project was going to require some money from their pockets. All of a sudden it was a whole new ballgame. At a time when inflation had brought wage and price controls, when President Richard Nixon was calling for trimming wasteful federal spending, when Dallas' aerospace industry had fallen off with the cutback of the space program and defeat of the SuperSonic Transport, when belts were being tightened on many fronts, the canal seemed increasingly like largesse to many people—especially if they were going to have to dig into their own pockets to help pay for it.
Then came Steelman's upset victory over Cabell with an unexpectedly high 56 per cent of the vote. Canal supporters read that weathervane with a definite feeling of queasiness. Could it be the canal might not happen?
Not good, not good, the Dallas establishment could see. Better get to work and let the folks know how important this is to them, how important for Dallas.
And so the big push started, and Unis was chosen to head it up.
The COST forces later applauded the choice of Unis for the lead role in selling the canal. He adopted the traditional Dallas "Big Daddy" downtown business leader approach: Don't ask questions; you don't need all that information to cast your vote. What's good for the downtown business folks is good for you. Always has been. Always will be.
The COST forces later said that Unis' rasping criticism of canal opponents as "environmental extremists" won more active opponents to the canal project every time Unis uttered it. City councilmen in some of Dallas' suburbs said later they had been turned off on the canal by Unis' paternalistic attitude.
After it became obvious a local bond vote was necessary, and the Steelman victory had indicated at least a twinge of doubt about the canal project in voters' minds, COST shifted its focus from Washington to Dallas.
Although the project had been tentatively authorized by Congress, before it could be built further study and appropriations hearings were necessary to clear the project for full construction allocations. Those hearings had been considered mere formalities. But the COST people made sure that it was made known that there were some people in the Trinity valley who weren't gung-ho for the canal.
Complaints that prophets of ecological doom like Fritz had made for years began to re-emerge. And lo and behold, even some semi-official sources of information began to bear him out.
A team of professors made an environmental impact study on the proposed Tennessee Colony reservoir for the Corps of Engineers, and concluded that the reservoir would drastically alter the local ecology. It would inundate thousands of acres of hardwood trees, which already were vanishing rapidly.
The lake itself, because of the polluted nature of the Trinity, might become so polluted that it could not fulfill one of its major purposes of water supply. It would create marshy conditions around its edges, possibly requiring relocation of the people of the town of Trinidad.
Another report by a different team of scientists said the proposed channelization of the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, in northwest Dallas County, should be "abandoned" as potentially hazardous to Dallas' drinking water supply, and preserved instead as a park.
(The canal proponents in fact were not committed to channelizing the Elm Fork, but in the new climate of concern for the environment and cost-consciousness, all adverse statements concerning projects on the Trinity were laid at their doorstep.)
And then the National Water Commission, a federal advisory group, cranked out a major national water report that said no more canal projects should be built with federal money, but should be financed by those who use them. If that suggestion had been followed on the Trinity, the project would have died immediately: Unis frankly admitted that business would not pick up the tab by itself to build the canal.
The Environmental Policy Center in Washington, a private group, called the canal proposal the nation's "number one boondoggle."
In this atmosphere, environmental hearings on the project did not go smoothly. Environmentalists called the canal economically and environmentally unsound—"welfare for the rich." A representative of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department said the project would cause "wholesale devastation" to the environment.
(Two weeks before the canal bond vote, the parks department reversed its stand, apparently under the urging of Gov. Dolph Briscoe, who according to environmentalists brought pressure on the department at the behest of Ben Carpenter.)
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