Kay tacks toward support of NAFTA superhighway.

One of the knocks people often have on Rick is his support for the Trans Texas Corridor, which I believe to be a brilliant way to fund our transportation needs over the next generation. Texas is growing by leaps and bounds, and we have to be aggressive with putting infrastructure in place to handle that growth. If not, we will all end up sitting in traffic for hours on end, day after day. Goods won't be able to get to market. Productivity will fall.

The bottom line is that we are going to build roads, so the question becomes how. Do we try privatizing some of the roads, which ends up earning the state money it can use toward other transportation projects? Do we raise taxes to build the roads? There are a lot of issues at play here. Roads are not free. Good, safe roads are even less free.

We need those roads though. Land will be taken through eminent domain one way or another, and let's face it, roads are an appropriate use of eminent domain, unlike a shopping mall or waterfront redevelopment.

However, before this week Kay had an opportunity to outflank Rick on the right of the GOP on the issue of toll roads. She even seemed to be headed down the right track with that crowd when she came out earlier this week and put forward a bill that would ban tolling of existing federal interstate lanes.

Throw that out the window. She is the same as Rick on this issue as far as the anti TTC group is concerned. Just look at some of the headlines... (link)...

NAFTA Superhighway still on track, new section near completion

Okay, innocent enough. A scary sounding NAFTA superhighway gets a lot of populist conservatives very riled up however.

I am a member of Kay's Facebook supporter page, and she is getting ripped apart over there...

Here is a screenshot...

Why the furor? I guess Kay has endorsed the controversial I-69 project that got Rick in so much hot water with the anti TTC crowd (link).

Why would she do this? Other than that she actually believes in it, I guess maybe she didn't understand how this issue makes people fired up and passionate. It is a small number of people who hate these roads, but they are very vocal and very angry.

There is a FOX news video from Kay's event down in the Valley, but there is no embedding code for it (link). In the video, she specifically mocks people who said I-69 was dead and specifically mentions Canada and Mexico as being involved.

This whole thing still confuses me. Kay is for I-69, but is she against a private company building it... is she going to secure any federal dollars for the project, or is this a state project? The whole point of the privatized system was that the feds weren't going to fund it so Texas had to find the money somewhere, and a private company could do it and actually pay the state for the right of doing so...

I am more confused than before. Is she trying but failing to woo the anti toll road people? Do we have a failure to communicate properly happening here, or did she actually take the wrong side of this issue? I feel like there may be a misunderstanding somewhere out there.