July 20, 2026 | Podcast
About six months ago, my wife and I got a letter in the mail saying our place was one of five possible routes for the Dinosaur Longshore transmission line project through Erath County. It’s a 765-kilovolt line, likely the largest transmission line project in state history, part of a build-out spurred by the Permian Basin Reliability Plan the legislature passed back in 2023.
I know enough about eminent domain and condemnation to know you can spend a lot of money, feel like a passionate activist, and still end up with the line anyway. So on this episode of Landowner Insider, I sat down with Carly Barton, an attorney at Braun & Gresham who represents rural Texas landowners in eminent domain cases, to actually understand the process before a route gets finalized on my own ranch.
What Eminent Domain Actually Means
Carly was direct about this: when a utility, pipeline, or government entity takes part of your land for a project, it’s a take, not a sale. You don’t get to negotiate whether it happens the way you would in a normal real estate deal, only what you’re paid for it. That distinction matters because it changes how you should think about the process from the start.
Not All Infrastructure Is Routed the Same Way
One of the most useful things Carly laid out is that pipelines, transmission lines, and roads all go through completely different routing processes.
For a pipeline, there’s no routing process for landowners to weigh in on at all. If it needs to cross your property to serve a public purpose, it can, and your recourse is limited to fair market value for the take.
Roads are more of a local negotiation. Entities like TxDOT hold community meetings and take feedback, and landowners who organize and engage with local officials early can genuinely influence where a road ends up. Carly pointed to a real example from her own work in Hays County, where a coalition of landowners helped shape the realignment of FM 150 by going property to property and grouping people by what they actually wanted, frontage for future development versus long-term conservation, and ultimately helped designate a stretch of that road as a heritage trail.
Transmission lines fall under the Texas Public Utility Commission. Before a route is finalized, the PUC requires utilities to notify potentially affected landowners, hold open houses in the community, and accept written comments and questionnaires. Landowners can formally intervene in what amounts to a mini trial in front of an administrative law judge, and neighbors can band together to argue why a specific segment doesn’t fit the routing criteria. But once the PUC orders a route, that’s it. As Carly put it, if you wait until you get an actual offer letter to get organized, you’re already too late to affect where the line goes.
Why 765-Kilovolt Lines Are Showing Up Now
These massive lines trace back to the Permian Basin Reliability Plan. The legislature directed the PUC to study a growing power need in West Texas driven by oil and gas operations now running on the grid, data centers and crypto mining, and general transmission congestion that’s been costing ratepayers across the state.
The PUC ultimately chose 765-kilovolt lines over the more familiar 345 and 500-kilovolt lines already in use in Texas. A single 765 line carries the equivalent of three double-circuit 345 lines, meaning less total land is encumbered statewide, but the individual impact on any one property is much bigger: towers roughly the height of a seven-story building, a wider right-of-way, and thicker conductors with a far larger visual footprint.
What Gives a Utility the Power to Take Your Land
Utilities like Encore derive their authority through a Certificate of Convenience and Necessity from the PUC, essentially a state-granted monopoly to build and operate transmission infrastructure. To route a new line, they have to demonstrate actual need and show the route satisfies criteria like cost, avoiding habitable structures, paralleling existing infrastructure or property lines, and environmental impact. Notably, the cost of building these lines gets recovered from ratepayers statewide, not just the people living under them, which is part of why utilities are motivated to keep costs down.
What Compensation Actually Looks Like
This is where it gets real for landowners. Carly walked through it using my own place as an example: a 40-acre home tract where a preferred route would cross the front of the property, right over our gate and along the lake. Compensation breaks down into three buckets: payment for the easement itself (typically the per-acre land value multiplied by roughly 0.9 to 0.95), damage to the remainder of the property’s value, and cost-to-cure items like replacing fences and gates.
The easement payment is usually straightforward. The real fight is almost always over damage to the remainder. A utility appraiser might argue 10 percent diminished value on the rest of your property; a landowner’s appraiser might argue 35 percent or more, especially given how visually dominant these 765 lines are and the fact that there’s no real precedent or comparable sales data yet for properties crossed by lines this size.
Pushback From the Legislature
Since this project was announced, a bipartisan group of 43 Texas legislators, including Rep. Brad Buckley, formally asked the PUC to pause several of these 765-kilovolt projects while questions get re-examined: the actual need for the lines, projected demand, cost to ratepayers, and impact on private property. Groups like American Stewards of Liberty have argued the demand forecasts tied to the original 2023 plan may be overstated and that data center growth, more than immediate grid reliability, is driving a lot of this build-out. Nothing has been formally paused as of this recording, but it’s clearly a live fight.
What Landowners Should Actually Do
Carly’s advice, distilled: open your mail. Certified letters and open house notices are the earliest signal you’ll get, and landowners who show up, fill out the questionnaire, and start talking to their neighbors before an application is even filed have real influence over where a line ends up. Once a route is ordered, that window closes.
If you get a notice, you can intervene in the PUC process yourself or hire an attorney, and cost varies enormously depending on how contested the project is, from around $10,000 on a smaller, less contested line up to $50,000-$100,000 on a major, heavily litigated 765 case. Neighbors on the same segment of a line can often share legal representation to bring costs down. And once you’re past the routing fight and into negotiating actual compensation, most attorneys work on contingency, meaning you don’t need a lot of cash upfront to get real representation.
A few other practical points worth remembering: don’t sign the first offer letter without getting advice, and know that condemning authorities do have the legal right to survey your property even if you initially say no, so it’s not worth escalating that fight.
Due Diligence Before You Buy
This conversation also underscored something worth thinking about before you ever purchase rural land: proposed routes for transmission lines, pipelines, and roads can materially affect a property’s value, and that information isn’t always disclosed by a seller. Working with a broker who has real local knowledge, and who actually researches proposed infrastructure projects in the area, matters as much here as anywhere else in a land purchase.
Watch the Full Episode
This article is based on my conversation with Carly Barton of Braun & Gresham on Landowner Insider. This episode is for educational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice.
Work With Mock Ranches
Whether you’re evaluating a property for proposed infrastructure risk or just trying to understand what affects long-term land value in Texas, our team can help you look past the surface. Explore current listings and market insights at mockranches.com.
About Braun & Gresham
A big thanks to Carly Barton and the team at Braun & Gresham for making the drive up and walking through all of this with us. Braun & Gresham is a Dripping Springs-based law firm representing rural landowners across Texas, on everything from eminent domain and condemnation to real estate transactions, estate planning, and conservation easements. If you’re facing a transmission line notice of your own, or just want a second opinion before you sign anything, visit braungresham.com to learn more or get in touch.
