People warned Rene Ramirez his fight to save El Milagro Ranch was lost long before it started.
The powerful state of Texas would take his property – ranchland that had been in his family for eight generations – plow it over and build a divided four-lane highway. There wasn’t much left to argue, they said, except to negotiate the best price possible and accept the heartbreak.
Then a curious thing happened. Ramirez won. And it’s a victory that could inspire far-reaching consequences for property owners across Texas.
Relying on a strategy of persistence, strong political alliances and an unwavering commitment to his family legacy, Ramirez managed to fend off the bulldozers on their way to Zapata County.
At least for now, he persuaded the Texas Department of Transportation to push its long-planned U.S. Highway 83 expansion to the east – keeping El Milagro‘s core structures, its corrals, cattle pens, cistern, a windmill and worker’s quarters, out of harm‘s way.
“I don’t know whether to cry or to jump up and down or get some sleep,’’ said Ramirez, who had a long career as a teacher and coach in Dallas and Fort Worth before taking over the family ranch. It’s been many months since the battle started and now “I realize that I haven’t slept in a year.”
The victory preserves a piece of Texas history. El Milagro‘s ranch lands represent the birthplace of Texas cattle ranching. The Ramirez family traces ownership all the way back to a 1760s Spanish land grant.
But it also signals something larger.
Property rights advocates, including landowners, ranchers and even some lawmakers, want to take lessons learned during Ramirez’s yearlong battle to protect his lands from eminent domain, the process by which government can require an owner to sell property to make way for any number of public improvements, including roads.
Specifically, the advocates would like to take those lessons and apply them to new legislation that would address aspects of the condemnation process that do not ensure equity.
“We have to build on the successes we’ve had here because this story is not done,” said Charles Maley, advocacy director for the South Texans’ Property Rights Association.
Property owners are often subjected to unfair and overwhelming eminent domain processes without a meaningful opportunity to have their voices and concerns heard, advocates contend. Where condemnation is necessary, property rights advocates said, landowners and private property owners deserve fair treatment, thorough and transparent proceedings and reasoned judgment.
What the Ramirez case shows is that government entities such as TxDOT, when pressured politically, can be open to negotiations with landowners who seek alternatives to its plans for condemnation, and that property owners can be treated fairly in such dealings, said Charlie Leal, legislative director for the Texas Farm Bureau.
“Whenever the private property of a farmer, a ranch or any landowner is threatened by a governmental entity we take it very seriously,” Leal said. “We’re committed to vigorously defending those rights.”
While Ramirez played his situation just right and achieved a positive result, many condemnation cases don’t end as favorably. In the last year, the Texas Transportation Commission unanimously approved more than a dozen eminent domain actions. meeting minutes and records show. Ramirez had the means to fight back but Maley and others said that more often the process moves forward without such consultation.
One issue confronting property owners is that current law does not require government agencies to take certain steps to ensure they are properly notified before eminent domain proceedings begin.
New legislation, Senate Bill 2513, sponsored by state Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, would change that. West, who is the vice-chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, was inspired by the rancher’s case when he introduced the legislation.
Leal said virtually every landowner in the state at least once in their lifetime is faced with a land dispute. The government, in fact, has taken El Milagro property at least three times prior to the most recent case.
But this time was more dire.
TxDOT’s plan called for the right of way to be located 25 feet from the front door of the ranch house. It would have meant the death of El Milagro.
Ramirez fought back and enlisted the support of West and other sympathetic lawmakers, leading to a fateful face-to-face meeting with TxDOT officials in Austin.
Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Bruce Bugg was unavailable for an interview for this story, but TxDOT officials acknowledged the recent meeting in Austin with Ramirez.
At the meeting, engineers presented an option for the project that would “minimize the impact on his property,” spokesman Adam Hammons wrote in response to questions from The Dallas Morning News.
The News had been looking into the El Milagro eminent domain case for about a month before the agreement was reached.
In a recent interview, Ramirez said he was satisfied with the outcome of his yearlong battle. The new proposal would only affect the edges of the property and keep El Milagro‘s core structures intact.
Still, Ramirez cautioned the reprieve from TxDOT may only be temporary.
He and his wife, Suzanne, who joined in the battle to protect the family’s ranchlands, are still cognizant of plans by TxDOT to expand the capacity of the highway to prepare for population growth over the next 30 years.
So even though the route in front of El Milagro is light with traffic and now has few accidents, it will undergo various phases of construction, including a long-planned extension from US 83 to Interstate 2.
TxDOT acknowledged that it was working on a new alignment but its plans to upgrade the route for the projected 1.4 million Gulf Coast residents who are escaping hurricanes has not changed.
Ramirez said he plans to hear back this month with a preliminary update about construction plans.
At a minimum, he said, the perimeter of the ranch will be sacrificed as part of a new alignment to spare its core structures.
He can live with that for now.
“I’m so grateful,” he said, shortly after the meeting with TxDOT in Austin, where he learned about the realignment, “and still a little in shock about the whole thing.”
Losing El Milagro
Ramirez never planned to be anyone’s hero – much less a cowboy defending a threatened way of life along the Texas-Mexico border.
El Milagro Ranch, a 1,600-acre patch of cactus and brush, is home to 50 head of cattle. Although the ranch had been in his family for generations, for much of his life he had no desire to be a rancher.
For three decades, Ramirez poured himself into his job as a Dallas area high school football coach and English teacher. He was at Bishop Lynch High School in Dallas for 13 years, then spent a decade at Nolan Catholic High School in Fort Worth, where he served as athletic director for three years before he retired in 2019.
That same year, at age 50, after some soul searching he decided to follow a new dream – to become a cattle rancher like his father, Rodolfo, and his father’s father, Leon, and the others who came before them.
So, over several years, he set out to renovate and restore the property, beginning with the ranch house, which had been built by his grandparents after the construction of a large reservoir and lake had flooded their home and hundreds of other homes in the early 1950s under the Rio Grande. He tore out the roof of the house where his parents had spent their first days as newlyweds and replaced a main wall of the structure, but didn’t mess with its foundation.
He patched miles of battered wire fencing and rotting posts so El Milagro‘s cows would not end up in the neighbor’s yard, or worse, on the adjacent highway. He labored for months ripping up spiny cactus in the soil before he could lay rows of barbed wire and square wire mesh to keep the cows in their pastures. Underground, where old fence posts were dug three or four feet deep, he yanked up rotted pieces of cedar.
He also took time to grow familiar with notable landmarks on the ranch – the pond, the beehive, the spot where a cow had collapsed and died, its skeletal remains lying clean in the sun. He placed street signs on dirt road crossings with names of family members – both living and deceased – to better find his way around the property.
The punishing territory of rattlesnakes, coyotes, wild boar — not to mention the rough terrain of spiny cactus and brush – demanded everything he had. But, in his quest, he likely touched every inch of El Milagro – three ponds, 13 pastures, barn, metal squeeze chutes made of pipe, corrals, outdoor shower, chicken coop, windmill, cistern, an undercover patio and a pair of small houses for each of the ranch dogs.
More than a year ago, he finished placing on the wall of the ranch house a large black and white photo of his grandfather Leon posing next to a horse and a 1960 White Cadillac. He stood a few feet from the white cistern on the property that still stands there today.
That was about the same time a letter arrived in the mail from TxDOT informing him of immediate plans to run a highway up to his front door and instructions for setting up an inspection date for an appraisal of the land.
“Plans have progressed,” the letter said, “to the point that we wish to advise you that a portion of your property will be needed as a right of way for the proposed improvement of the highway.”
Ill-advised plans
The letter was jarring.
“Obviously, I’m very upset,” he said, recalling the shock, “and I had no idea that this was coming.”
He grew even more frustrated when he looked further into TxDOT’s communication about its plans to widen the highway. Somewhere in the bureaucratic logjam, the local appraisal district had a wrong address for him in Zapata County. But TxDOT didn’t verify the address was correct, so he never received the notice that was mailed to him five years prior to the demolition notification that arrived last spring.
Also, he learned that the land at issue was not being condemned for any necessary immediate highway construction, but rather for construction on US 83 that may not occur for another 30 years.
In 2012, construction crews had finished another expansion on the road that took four years to complete. Now with plans to build a 300-foot divider in between the lanes, there would be another demolition and then likely another to rebuild two bridges on either side of El Milagro.
“So here we are with a brand new highway and they want to demo it and rebuild it,’’ he said. “Really doesn’t that seem like a colossal waste of money?”
When taking property to build highways, TxDOT generally follows a playbook that’s been in place for many years, said Stephen Mattingly, professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington.
What the public often doesn’t understand, he said, is the long-term construction effort requires planning decades before the road will be needed, because of cost and the time to build it.
From TxDOT’s perspective, its engineers likely made adequate efforts to contact landowners such as Ramirez to notify them of meetings to discuss projects.
TxDOT also has a compelling safety argument. Building dividers between the lanes, Mattingly said, would separate the amount of space between cars in the opposite direction and reduce the likelihood of head-on collisions.
That said, a problem that plagues many government agencies such as TxDOT is the disconnect between the recommendations of its professionals and the needs of the public. Very often, Mattingly said, ill-informed decisions are made that upend the lives of everyday people.
As engineers, “we often don’t think about the potential implications of our design on people in the communities that we are impacting,’’ he said. “The highway ultimately is to serve the community and some engineers just care about whether they got an adequate design.”
Long before state lawmakers such as Dallas’ West intervened on the landowner’s behalf, Mattingly said TxDOT should have looked at and presented options that didn’t place the right of way in front of the ranch house.
If TxDOT “didn’t consider any alternatives,” Mattingly said, “and this is just someone drew a line on a map and decided this is where we’re putting it, then that’s a mistake.”
Building alliances
Property rights leaders told Ramirez that if he had any chance at all he would need to find powerful allies who could pressure TxDOT.
He met with people such as Leal with the Farm Bureau and Maley with the South Texans’ Property Rights Association. He worked closely with the offices of several state lawmakers, including West, state Rep. Ryan Guillen, R-Rio Grande City, and state Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo. Some staffers from Zaffirini’s office visited El Milagro Ranch.
West, in particular, went out of his way to set up a meeting between Ramirez and TxDOT. Late last year, for example, the senator told The News, his staff, joined by the Texas Farm Bureau, urged TxDOT to reengineer the section of roadway affecting El Milagro so the highway would not be right outside his front door.
“ … we must be careful when using eminent domain to ensure we are doing so with common sense,’’ West told The News.
Many more participated behind the scenes. They provided introductions and arranged for meetings with several TxDOT engineers. Ramirez even held conversations with two of the five members of the Texas Transportation Commission.
Roughly three months after he received the demolition letter from TxDOT, he walked into a meeting of the Texas Transportation Commission.
By then, several people at TxDOT already knew him. Several engineers who met with him at El Milagro had presented a plan to push the highway back 50 feet rather than the original plan of 25 feet from the front door of his ranch house, but he believed it was still too close to the 75 mph highway and would be unsafe for his family and the animals.
Last August, at the packed commission meeting, he waited for his turn to speak, then appeared at the lectern in his cowboy hat. He was a little intimidated by the well polished people in the room.
After the meeting was adjourned, commission members and executives surrounded him, he said. Texas Transportation Commissioner W. Alvin New gave him his card and urged him to call to begin the appraisal process and that at the end of it he would be handsomely compensated.
By October, more letters from state lawmakers – and even members of Congress – arrived urging TxDOT to save El Milagro‘s ranchlands and move the highway to another location.
Few people were more sympathetic than Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, an eighth-generation rancher himself.
Millions who grew up in other places may not understand, Miller said, but Texas ranching and farming communities hold their land sacred. The land represents the family’s heritage, grit and perseverance throughout centuries.
“At some point, I don’t know where, but after that third or fourth generation those families no longer own the land,” Miller said in an interview with The News early this year. “The land owns them.”
“You can’t separate the two,’’ he said. “You’re part of the land.”
Miller agreed to write a letter to TxDOT to urge that it consider other options for its proposed right of way.
“I’m not in charge,” he said, “but the way I would do it is that I would take property like that as a last resort. But the way it’s done is they just ignore the legacy of the properties and do what’s expedient.
“I think we are better than that.”
In the fall, an appraiser arrived at El Milagro to measure, inspect and photograph the property. The appraiser and the right-of-way manager were thorough, Ramirez said, but the appraised value of the property they offered him didn’t match up with the dozens of receipts for upgrades to the ranch house and other improvements.
It also didn’t factor in the sentimental value of the property, he said.
“The number they offered me was dreadful,” said Ramirez, who declined to disclose the offer.
By November, Ramirez was back in Austin in a meeting with Brian Barth, a deputy executive director for TxDOT, to discuss the appraisal.
No agreement was reached. The negotiations were put on hold.
Many sacrifices
TxDOT’s push into El Milagro stirred up old resentments among the people of Zapata County toward the government. Many of them, including the Ramirez family, descend from those who have lost their lands more than once.
In the 1950s, El Milagro shrunk by 2,000 acres when the federal government built a reservoir at the foot of Lake Falcon. More than 450 townspeople who lived near the Rio Grande were forced to move to higher ground before the completion of the dam.
Among them were Rene Ramirez’s grandparents, who had to flee their home and build the three-bedroom ranch house, which now still stands, west of US 83.
“It was during the Eisenhower administration,” said Ileana Craft, Rene Ramirez’s older sister who spent summers on the ranch with their parents. “They took half of our ranch to build Lake Falcon. They took the whole town. It’s underwater.
“And every now and then,” she said, “when we have a dry spell, you can see the rooftops out of the lake, and the church steeples.”
The Ramirez family and thousands of others had planned to move after the dam was built, however an unexpected rainfall caused flooding and an emergency evacuation, forcing the relocation effort to take several months longer than expected.
While land titles were sorted, the government did not adequately compensate families to rebuild their homes in the new location, said Joe Rathmell, who has served as the Zapata County judge since 2011. Instead, he said, the government offered them pennies on the dollar under a formula based on the market value.
After the construction of the dam, more examples of government encroachment came to infringe on El Milagro‘s territory.
A string of large utility poles were buried next to the ranch house, removing more acreage. Then, just in the last decade, a two-lane highway, originally built in 1935, was expanded to four lanes, shrinking the property even more.
Even though some of the events happened long ago, Rathmell said people in Zapata can still feel the sting of those losses.
“We’ve sacrificed quite a bit over the years,’’ he said.
No one knows better than Zaffirini, the senator from Laredo, about those sacrifices. She has served the Zapata community since 1987.
When contacted by Ramirez, she instructed her staff to monitor TxDOT’s eminent domain proceedings. In her communications with TxDOT, Zaffirini emphasized the multiple times his family had faced condemnation and had to adapt its ranch, often at great personal and financial cost, to meet a government agency’s demands.
Preserving the ranch “is a matter of respect for our community’s history,” she wrote in her letter to TxDOT.
While the importance of a highway expansion is recognized, she wrote, “it is essential to carefully consider whether the immediate acquisition of this land truly is necessary …”
The battle ahead
Of broader significance, the El Milagro land battle prompted renewed discussions at the Legislature on landowner rights.
In late April, Ramirez appeared before the Senate Transportation Committee to testify on behalf of Senate Bill 2513, which was sponsored by West that would require TxDOT to make an attempt to contact a property owner in person if the property owner did not respond to a mailed notice about a highway project on or adjacent to their property within 60 days.
Property advocates see the notification requirement as an essential step in ensuring fairness and transparency in the eminent domain process. If TxDOT had been required to make sure the initial notification had been shared with the Ramirez household, Leal said, the family could have objected to plans well before TxDOT completed its design work for the roadway expansion.
“From day 1, (the Ramirez family) would have said, ‘Wait a minute, this is going to impact us pretty negatively and we want to voice our opposition,’ ” Leal said. “Unfortunately, when Ramirez got the letter, the letter said, ‘Hey, we’re ready to move forward and here’s the new line and it’s going to be on your front porch so we’re going to probably have to take your house.’
“To go from having no clue that the project was even out there to getting a letter saying all right we’re ready to take the property, that’s pretty jarring.”
Maley and others also plan to push for new legislation in upcoming sessions that clarifies when TxDOT can use eminent domain.
Current law authorizes TxDOT to acquire personal property whenever the agency deems it “necessary or convenient” for a state highway purpose.
Bottom line, Maley said, the Ramirez case proved beyond a shadow of doubt that when TxDOT repeatedly said, “ ‘No, it has to be this way,’ it really didn’t have to be this way. Because if it absolutely positively had to be this way, they wouldn’t have negotiated.
“They wouldn’t have made such an easy change.”
In future sessions, Maley predicted, legislators will see more examples of alliances between rural and urban property owners.
“It just looks different,” Maley said, “but the impact is the same; the eminent domain process is the same and the villains, if you will, are the same.”
And they will also hear demands that property owners must receive an equitable price for their properties, he said. Currently, government entities are only required to compensate owners based on the appraised fair market value, which often tends to be much lower than replacement costs.
“Let’s figure out how to put some things in statute that slightly better protect everybody, rich or poor, where people don’t have to come to the Capitol,” Maley said, “where they don’t have to fight at the courthouse every time they turn around to try to get what’s theirs. Let’s make it fair on the front end.”
Ramirez, who served as the inspiration for many of the legislative proposals that Maley and others expect to come before Legislature in upcoming years, considers himself one of the lucky ones.
He had the resources to fight a battle that many under similar circumstances do not. Over nearly a year, he spent long hours studying roadway and traffic data that he presented in meetings with TxDOT to push his case for the need for a realignment of the roadway. He also was able to make the nearly five-hour drive to hearings and meetings in Austin to appear before legislators and transportation officials.
Many people, Maley said, also don’t have the resources to hire lawyers to fight on their behalf.
Even now, Ramirez is still trying to keep the bulldozers off his land. He has filed an application with the State Historical Association to name El Milagro as one of the state’s most revered ranches. The application is pending.
He’s not sure it would stop the demolition of his beloved ranch house, but it would certainly be a way to honor his forebears, who managed to preserve the ranch over two centuries.
Mostly, he’s thankful TxDOT has done the right thing for his beloved El Milagro. For now.
