On Saturday, April 20th, we will hold a full day music festival here on our farm to further fund our legal battle.
Appropriately named “Stand Tall”, our concert will feature 7 amazing bands from across the state. The Octopus Project, our headliner band with an awesome light show, and from Austin, won’t start until 9:00 p.m.. So even if you’re attending one of the many Earth Day events during the day you can still take part in our historic concert. The music will be as colorful, exciting and diverse as all of you supporting us in this property rights battle, so we hope you’ll be able to attend.
Bring a blanket, chairs and a picnic basket, and sit on a hill overlooking the farm we are working so hard to protect. Tickets will be $20 online, or at the gate, and primitive camping out in our pasture is just $10 a vehicle.
We hope you’ll want to come enjoy a great day of great music and camaraderie while supporting our family’s fight to protect our land.
CLICK HERE for MORE Info and to order tickets!
BACKGROUND:
What if a private corporation decided that they wanted to take your land for their own private gain? What if the state you lived in let them do it, whether you wanted to sell your land or not?
Stand with Texas Landowners to Stop Eminent Domain Abuse: Donate to the Crawford Family Legal Defense Fund
“There’s no such thing as a voluntary agreement with a company or government that has the power to take your property,”
—Bill Peacock, vice president for the Texas Public Policy Foundation
In Direct, Texas (a little bitty town near Paris, in NE Texas), farm manager Julia Trigg Crawford manages a 600-acre farm that’s been in her family since 1948. Canadian pipeline company, TransCanada, threatens her family’s health and their farm that is adjacent to the Red River.
Mega-corporation, TransCanada, the company proposing the Keystone XL project, wants to seize parts of the Crawford’s land to build a 36” pipeline that will pump corrosive tar sands — at a pressure far higher than conventional oil – down to refineries in South Texas. When TransCanada came knocking to try and buy the Crawford family land, Julia Trigg did not want to sell.
“One of my first concerns was, to go the path they had planned, they had to horizontally drill under the creek that I have water rights to… I didn’t exactly want this sludge being pumped underneath the creek.”
—Julia Trigg Crawford
After the Crawford family refused to sell to TransCanada, the next step for this foreign company was to condemn their land. They legally had the power to do this because – and you’re not going to believe this – they simply checked a box on a “T4” form for the Texas Railroad Commission (the body that regulates the oil and gas industry in Texas) that says ‘common carrier.’ Common carrier status carries with it the power of eminent domain – the right to seize property. Meanwhile, the Railroad Commission openly states that they have no regulatory authority to make sure that a private company does not abuse the power of eminent domain. And, guess what, the Commission filed an amicus letter stating that they wanted to keep things the way they are.
Julia Trigg Crawford is a 6’0” former star basketball player for Texas A&M – the Governor’s alma mater. So far, the Governor and our two US Senators, Cornyn and Hutchison, are siding with TransCanada and apparently see no problem with the abuse of eminent domain in Texas.
The point is that ordinary Texans do see a real problem with eminent domain and they are standing behind Julia Trigg Crawford and her family.