Texas Monthly

Hundreds of landowners across the northern Hill Country were dismayed to find out that enormous power poles and wires could soon scar their properties. They learned that transmission lines of this size—headless Iron Giants as tall as 198 feet and carrying 765,000 volts—had never been built in Texas. A map showed the potential routes for the project, one of three such undertakings.

Shocked landowners scrambled to file protests, a process that has been criticized as unfair, confusing, opaque, and rushed. The best anyone could hope for was to convince the utilities behind the project to route the transmission lines elsewhere in the region.

Earlier this year, a new map was released. The number of potentially affected property owners went up, from 2,800 to roughly 4,200. But one prominent Texan had reason to celebrate: Dallas billionaire and pipeline magnate Kelcy Warren. Under the preliminary map, Warren’s 20,000-plus-acre ranch was crisscrossed by five links; now it would host none. The result of the new map was that Warren, a major donor to President Trump and Governor Greg Abbott, no longer faces the prospect of transmission lines severing his property—despite never filing a formal protest.

Why? Read the full investigation at the link in our bio.

📸: Getty