AUSTIN – About 50 public officials and business people traveled to Austin to lobby the 84th Texas Legislature Feb. 3.

Chamber President  Jo Ann Hanstrom called the trip a “great success,” noting the group met with elected representatives and heard reports from the Texas Department of Transportation, the Public Utility Commission and the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Homeland Security Division.

Hanstrom asked for the agency presentations, and Sen. Robert Nichols' office arranged the schedule.

“I’m so appreciative of all the citizens who took time out of their busy schedules to travel to Austin for Cedar Creek Lake Area Day in the 84th Texas Legislature,” Hanstrom said in a statement.

The Chamber of Commerce hosted the trip to Austin by chartering a 48-passenger bus. Others drove to Austin in their cars to join in the effort. Elected officials and their staff joined the group for lunch at the Double Tree Hotel in downtown Austin near the Capitol.

Senators Robert Nichols and Bob Hall and Representatives Stuart Spitzer and John Wray introduced the Cedar Creek Lake contingency in their respective chambers.

Officials for Gun Barrel City and ONCOR, this year’s sponsors of the event, participated in the daylong, 16-hour trip. Mayor Jim Braswell, City Manager Gerry Boren and Council members Ronald Wryick and Carol Calkins took part. This was the eighth time for the chamber to host the trip to the Capitol for Legislative Day since the organization unified in 2001.

Barton told the group during an afternoon presentation in a Capitol conference room that an additional $1.47 billion in funding from oil and gas tax revenues awarded for infrastructure improvements by the legislature would allow TxDot to increase the size of the Highway 334 bridge connection Gun Barrel City to Seven Points.

 TxDot will complete an environmental study in the summer that must precede any construction work on the bridges. Officials will determine in a feasibility study whether to build an entirely new bridge with two lanes going west and two lanes going east at a cost of $50 million or to keep the existing bridge and build a new bridge at a higher level next to it to facilitate two lanes going in each direction at a cost of $25 million, Barton said. The new bridge would be built at a higher level so that in years to come the older bridge could be torn down and replaced with a higher bridge to allow large boats passage underneath, he added.

Widening the current bridge would require TxDot officials to acquire some land on the north side of the current bridge to complete the construction, according to Barton’s staff.

TxDot officials said they would begin to hold public meetings to explain the bridge widening project as the plan proceeds. Chamber officials said they would assist in the scheduling of the public meetings.

PUC Executive Director Brian Lloyd discussed the agency’s regulation of electricity, telephone and water companies. His agency took over the economic regulation of Texas’ 700 water companies late last year from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, which still controls the management of water quality and distribution.

The official said his agency would be requiring water companies, such as Monarch Water Co. that serves some residents in the Cedar Creek Lake area, to prove their costs to get water price approval, Lloyd said. Monarch officials have already agreed not to raise any prices before 2017, and the agency will be reviewing their costs and prices in the company’s first report in 2016, he said.

Homeland Security Director Steve McGraw, a former FBI agent, warned the group that the Mexican drug cartels threaten the security of Texas through their organized criminal activity that includes the smuggling of drugs and humans and terroristic activity. “What they do in Mexico is second to none in the world,” he said. “…They’re butchers.” He described people being burned and hacked to death by the cartels.

An unsecured border allows the transport of drugs and humans for forced labor and commercial sex, McGraw said. Six major cartels operating on the Texas-Mexico border smuggle marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States for distribution, McGraw noted. The illegal smuggling of drugs and humans amounts to profits of tens of billions of dollars for the cartels, he added.

Human bondage is more prevalent in large urban areas, but drug smuggling and gang activity affects rural areas, he said.

McGraw said the cartels charge illegal immigrants large sums of money to smuggle them into the U.S., then force them into slave labor or prostitution or demand ransoms from their families in other countries.

The law enforcement director said the Lower Rio Grande Valley is awash in corruption as a result of the cartels terrorizing and bribing public officials.

A survey of captured illegal aliens reveals the entrance of people from all other countries ranging from “Afghanistan to Yemen,” the official said.

McGraw said the Legislature charged the Texas Department of Public Safety with regaining control of the border area last June, and the agency has made progress in reducing the influx of illegal aliens and particularly criminal aliens who commit armed robberies, sexual assaults, kidnappings and homicides. “There’s no doubt we have made an impact,” he said.