the power of a state or the federal government to take private property for public use while requiring just compensation to be given to the original owner. It can be legislatively delegated by the state to municipalities, government subdivisions, or even to private persons or corporations, when they are authorized to exercise the functions of public character.
Property taken by eminent domain may be for government use or by delegation to third parties, who will devote it to public or civic use or, in some cases, to economic development. The most common uses are for government buildings and other facilities, public utilities, highways and railroads. However, it may also be taken for reasons of public safety, as in the case of Centralia, Pennsylvania, where land was taken due to an underground mine fire.
- foreign direct investment (FDI):|
purchase of an asset in another country, such that it gives direct control to the purchaser over the asset (e.g. purchase of land and building). In other words, it is an investment in the form of a controlling ownership in a business, in real estate or in productive assets such as factories in one country by an entity based in another country. It is thus distinguished from a foreign portfolio investment or foreign indirect investment by a notion of direct control.
- fracking:
a well stimulation technique involving the fracturing of bedrock formations by a pressurized liquid. The process involves the high-pressure injection of "fracking fluid" (primarily water, containing sand or other proppants suspended with the aid of thickening agents) into a wellbore to create cracks in the deep-rock formations through which natural gas, petroleum, and brine will flow more freely. When the hydraulic pressure is removed from the well, small grains of hydraulic fracturing proppants (either sand or aluminium oxide) hold the fractures open.
- Good Roads Amendment:
Texas highways are financed by revenue from a state gasoline tax, vehicle registration fees, and federal assistance. In 1946 Texas voters approved a good-roads constitutional amendment that provides a guaranteed income for state highways by prohibiting the diversion of receipts from gasoline taxes and vehicle registration to non-highway purposes. The amendment reserved a quarter of the revenues for the Available School Fund and set the remainder aside permanently for state highways. In 1988 voters approved another amendment to ensure that federal funds reimbursing the state for highway work also are dedicated to highway purposes.
- - Federal Aid Road Act of 1916.
- - Good Roads Movement.
- - TLRL: HJR 49, 49th R.S.
- - TSHA: Highway Development.
- - Comptroller: Texas Road Finance.
- NAFTA:
an agreement signed by Canada, Mexico, and the United States that created a trilateral trade bloc in North America. The agreement came into force on January 1, 1994, and superseded the 1988 Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement between the United States and Canada.[2] The NAFTA trade bloc formed one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product.
- - United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement.
- negative externalities:
a cost that is suffered by a third party as a consequence of an economic transaction. In a transaction, the producer and consumer are the first and second parties, and third parties include any individual, organisation, property owner, or resource that is indirectly affected. Externalities are also referred to as spillover effects, and a negative externality is also referred to as an ‘external cost’.
- public-private partnerships
(PPPs): a long-term arrangement between a government and private sector institutions. Typically, it involves private capital financing government projects and services up-front, and then drawing revenues from taxpayers and/or users over the course of the PPP contract. Public–private partnerships have been implemented in multiple countries and are primarily used for infrastructure projects. They have been employed for building, equipping, operating and maintaining schools, hospitals, transport systems, and water and sewerage systems.
- regulation:
in government, a rule or mechanism that limits, steers, or otherwise controls social behaviour. In the field of public policy, regulation refers to the promulgation of targeted rules, typically accompanied by some authoritative mechanism for monitoring and enforcing compliance. Accordingly, for a long time in the United States, for example, the study of regulation has been synonymous with the study of the independent agencies enforcing it.
- rule of capture:
a rule of non-liability for captured natural resources including groundwater, oil, gas, and game animals. The general rule is that the first person to "capture" such a resource owns that resource. For example, landowners who extract or “capture” groundwater, oil, or gas from a well that bottoms within the subsurface of their land acquire absolute ownership of the substance even if it is drained from the subsurface of another’s land.
- subsidence:
a general term for downward vertical movement of the Earth's surface, which can be caused by both natural processes and human activities. Subsidence involves little or no horizontal movement, which distinguishes it from slope movement. Processes that lead to subsidence include dissolution of underlying carbonate rock by groundwater; gradual compaction of sediments; withdrawal of fluid lava from beneath a solidified crust of rock; mining; pumping of subsurface fluids, such as groundwater or petroleum; or warping of the Earth's crust by tectonic forces.
- Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ):
the environmental agency for the state of Texas. The history of natural resource protection by the State of Texas is one of gradual evolution from protecting the right of access to natural resources (principally surface water) to a broader role in protecting public health and conserving natural resources for future generations of Texans.
