KERA’s Living with the Trinity Project
February 3, 2010 by Shelley Tate Garner
Filed under Editor Blogs, The Arts
KERA-TV’s documentary Living with the Trinity explores this fascinating chapter in the river’s political history. The one-hour program is being offered to public television stations statewide to coincide with Earth Day in April 2010. Living with the Trinity airs Tuesday, April 20 at 8:00 p.m. on KERA-TV. The program will rebroadcast Wednesday, April 21 at 10:00 p.m.
Living with the Trinity examines the period from 1965 to 1973 when the Trinity River was nearly transformed into a barge canal running from North Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. Congressman Jim Wright of Fort Worth, working with the Johnson Administration, was able to win Congressional approval of nearly $1-billion for what would become a highly controversial project. Seventeen counties in the river basin voted on a bond issue to supplement the federal funding. The bond issue failed by just 20,000 votes and the barge canal was never built.
“The most powerful people in Texas wanted the project to succeed,” says KERA’s Executive Producer and Project Director Rob Tranchin. “Why they wanted the canal and how they were defeated constitute an amazing chapter in Texas environmental history.”
Living with the Trinity includes interviews with former Fort Worth Congressman, U.S. Speaker of the House and canal proponent, Jim Wright, and Dallas businessman and former U.S. Congressman, Alan Steelman, who unseated four-term Congressman Earle Cabell in the 1972 election and rallied opposition to the project. Fort Worth Star TelegramColumnist Bob Ray Sanders and Lee Cullum, host of KERA’s business program CEO, offer insight from their perspectives as reporters who covered these issues for KERA-TV.
Living with the Trinity is funded by a leadership grant from The Meadows Foundation with additional support provided by The Dixon Water Foundation.
The documentary is part of a two-year project that includes a Web site at www.TrinityRiverTexas.org where visitors can explore the geography, ecology and cultural history of the Trinity River through interactive maps, videos and photographs.
