Abbott: ‘Need for speed’ in action against BLM

The state is reaching a point to where something quickly needs to happen to resolve the land dispute between Texas landowners and the Bureau of Land Management, the top elected official in the state said Tuesday evening. Wichita Falls-native Gov. Greg Abbott was in Wichita Falls to be the keynote speaker at the Americanism dinner, sponsored by the Boy Scouts of America's Northwest Texas Council. Before the event, though, he met with a few landowners in danger of losing their land the BLM claims it has owned since the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. A map was placed on a table that displayed where the landowners' property ends according to historic deeds, and where the BLM says that boundary is. Abbott said he began fighting the federal agency when he was Texas' attorney general before being elected governor in 2014. "What I got to see tonight were further changes in the way the BLM is doing a land grab of Texas property," he said. "So I'm getting even more information that will empower Texas to take the next appropriate steps to protect our landowners." In question are about 45,000 acres along a 116-mile stretch land along the Red River from Doan's Crossing in Wilbarger County to Stanfield in northeast Clay County. The BLM says a treaty with Spain and U.S. Supreme Court cases in the 1920s justify their claim, but landowners and surveyors in Texas disagree...more