The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 106, No. 9, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 29, 1996 Page: 4 of 24
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letters
to the editors
We are some of the citizens
who were forced to file the Cana-
dian River lawsuit against the
Texas General Land Office in or-
der to protect our land and prop-
erty rights.
The Amarillo News-Globe
and other local media have earned
columns by Texas Land Commis-
sioner Garry Mauro about the Ca-
nadian River lawsuit that are so
wrong and misleading that we feel
obligated to tell our fellow citizens
the truth about what the Land Of-
fice tried to do to us along the
Canadian River.
We did not seek years of litiga-
tion with the Land Office. It has
been extremely expensive to us,
and it has caused us many sleep-
less nights. But we own this river-
front land, and many of our
families have lived on or near this
land for generations.
The land patents that our
predecessors purchased from the
state of Texas say that our land
extends to the river, and the me-
anders of the river mark our prop-
erty lines. Along our part of the
river, the original land patents
were one-half mile wide and two
miles deep, so that the state could
grant more riverfront patents.
The unique feature of our land is
that it fronts the river.
The Canadian River lawsuit
started several years ago w’hen
the Land Office, at Commissioner
Mauro’s direction, spent hun-
dreds of thousands of the taxpay-
ers’ dollars to conduct a
completely incorrect survey along
the Canadian River. Decisions of
the United States and Texas su-
preme courts required the Land
Office to conduct a gradient
boundary survey to mark the line
between our land and the river,
but the Land Office did not con-
duct a gradient boundary survey.
The Land Office advertised for
a surveyor to perform a “historical
survey” rather than a gradient
boundary survey. The Land Office
hired a surveyor who admitted
that the types of survey he per-
formed has never been done on
any other Texas river. Two of the
leading gradient boundary sur-
veyors in Texas have testified that
the Land Office’s survey of the
Canadian was not a proper gradi-
ent boundary survey.
The Land Office’s surveyor
claimed to have located old flood
banks, created decades ago before
Sanf' >r i Dam stopped the roaring
■ the Ca-
nadian a few times each decade.
According to the Land Office’s
surveyor, the present “banks” of
the ( anadian Rive- are dry little
mounds of dirt and -and found in
the upland pastures, covered by
ree- and tall grasses There has
beet no flowing water near the
Land Office’s “banks” since the
last big flood.
A gradient boundary survey
w'ould never mark flood banks as
the river’s edge. The gradient
boundary survey w'as intended to
mark the water-washed banks
that confine the water in the river
when the river is at its normal or
average flow, not during droughts
and not during floods.
The Land Office’s surveyor
claimed that the Canadian River,
as it flows by our land, is wider
than the Mississippi River at its
widest point. His survey was ab-
surd, yet Commissioner Mauro
persisted in attempting to have
the court impose that survey on
our land. Had he been successful,
the boundary of our land would
have been moved back more than
a mile from the river in places. We
would n o longer owm the river-
front land to which wre are entitled
under our land patents.
The Land Office also claimed
ihat when Sanford Dam w’as
closed in the 1960s, the dam froze
the boundaries of the river forever
at the last old flood banks. That
claim was a wmong statement of
the lawr, and it had already been
rejected in other cases by the U.S.
Supreme Court and the Texas
courts.
State District Judge Kent
Sims of Wheeler considered ex-
tensive testimony and legal brief-
ing about the Land Office’s
survey, and he ruled that it wras
not a gradient boundary survey as
required by Texas lawr. Sims also
rejected the Land Office’s claim
that Sanford Dam, which is 18
miles or more west of our prop-
erty, changed the law' that gov-
erns river boundaries. He
conscientiously read and applied
Texas law. Sims did his job, and it
is unfair and unbecoming for
Mauro, w'ho is a lawyer himself, to
attack the judge in the press.
After presiding over the Cana-
dian River litigation for several
years, Sims also found that the
actions of the Land Office in the
Canadian River case were unrea-
sonable. Under a statute enacted
by the Texas Legislature, Sims’
finding allows us to recover some
of the surveyor’s and attorney’s
fees we have spent defending our
land against the unreasonable
claims of the Land Office. After
the attorney general agreed that
the case should be moved to
Collingsworth County, Sims con-
ducted a trial in Wellington last
month on the amount of fees w'e
should recover. After hearing the
evidence, 12 jurors found unani-
mously that w^e should recover
from the Land Office some of the
money we have been required to
spend.
There has not been any oil and
Continued on Page 5
opinion
page
Taking Buchanan seriously
Continued from Page 2
the resentment w'hich he has so accurately identified.
In an era w?hen worker’s pay lags dramatically behind
inflation, when massive job cuts are the norm and lost
health benefits the inevitable result, when the richest
1% of the American people have gained 91% in real
income w’hile the middle class barely holds its own
and the poorest among us has grown 17% poorer still,
Pat Buchanan has found a hungry audience.
In an era when the wealthiest 1% controls 42% of
the nation’s household assets and 50% of its financial
assets, when corporate profits are at a 40-year high
but the minimum wage—adjusted for inflation—is at
its second-lowest level since 1955, Pat Buchanan has
addressed those very real concerns.
In doing so, however, he champions an exclusion-
ary, isolationist remedy that is ill-advised, myopic,
and regressive. He feeds fear writh bigotry, and pro-
vokes anti-immigrant hostility with a carefully-
cloaked call for racial purity.
Buchanan claims Joseph McCarthy and General-
issimo Francisco Franco as his childhood heroes, and
extols Adolph Hitler as “an individual of great cour-
age” and "a political organizer of the first rank." His
association with and appeal to neo-Nazis and white
supremacists is no accident, and his invitation to
intolerance cannot be dismissed.
Pat Buchanan is not representative of the Ameri-
can ideal and ethic, nor is he an accurate spokesman,
we hope, for the Republican party. Pat Buchanan is
not who we are as a country, nor should he be who we
will someday become.
What's D'Amato with Al?
Continued from Page 3
him on both cheeks, and the jury convicted him of
conspiracy to defraud and lying to the federal gov-
ernment.) Hey, who cares about that old stuff like
D’Amato and S&Ls, D’Amato and the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, D’Amato and
Roy Cohn, D’Amato and Wedtech, D’Amato and Joe
Marigotta, D’Amato and junk bonds? What are you.
a historian?
I’m talking about the nifty new stuff, like June
1993. Al made thirty-seven thousand, one hundred
and twenty-five dollars in a single day on an initial
stock offering made possible by a Long Island bro-
kerage firm that, at the time, had serious Securities
and Exchange Commission fraud charges pending
against it and has since been heavily fined and sanc-
tioned. Al was then the ranking Republican on the
Banking Committee, which oversees the SEC. Al’s
broker at the finn bought four thousand five hundred
shares of the new stock for Al at four dollars a share
and sold them the same day for twelve dollars and
twenty five cents a share — a deal not available to
ordinary investors.
I’m talking about Al and his brother Armand.
Forget Armand and the race-track interests and all
that old stuff; let’s talk Armand and Unisys in the late
1930s. Unisys, a Long Island defense contractor,
hires Armand and pays him one hundred twenty
thousand dollars to lobby for Pentagon contract busi-
ness. The checks are made out to a law partner of
Armand’s. Armand gets Al’s office to send the Navy
two letters on Al’s stationery, both ghostwritten by
Unisys employees and with Al’s signature on them.
Al is on the Defense Appropriations Committee, and
the Pentagon gives Unisys a one-hundred-million-
dollar contract. Armand gets convicted of mail fraud,
is sentenced to five months and is out on appeal; A;
gets a rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee and
never releases the documents. Appearance of posni
ble impropriety, anyone?
.V/ollij Ictus is a fanner Observer editor and a
columnist far the Fort Worth Stnr-Tetegram.
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Ezzell, Nancy & Brown, Laurie Ezzell. The Canadian Record (Canadian, Tex.), Vol. 106, No. 9, Ed. 1 Thursday, February 29, 1996, newspaper, February 29, 1996; Canadian, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth738681/m1/4/?q=green+energy: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Hemphill County Library.