BROWNSVILLE, September 10 - For the same amount of money the federal government is spending on the border wall, China revamped its infrastructure in order to stage the Olympics, a state legislator has claimed.

State Rep. Lon Burnam said cost estimates for the border wall were now running as high as $49 billion. He said there was no question which of the two projects was the better value for money.

“Ironically, $49 billion is the same cost as China put into the infrastructure for the Olympics. What did China get for that $49 million of infrastructure? They added to the transportation facilities, they added to the public events facilities,” Burnam said. “This (the border wall) is just bad, bad, public policy.”

Burnam made his comments at a news conference held at the Brownsville Events Center to denounce the border wall project. It was hosted by Brownsville Mayor Pat Ahumada and the Texas Border Coalition.

Burnam’s comments coincided with testimony given to Congress by Richard Stana, the Government Accountability Office's director of homeland security, about the cost of the border wall project. Stana said the average cost of the project per mile is now $7.5 million.

Also testifying before Congress, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Ralph Basham said his agency needed an extra $400 million in order to build the 370 miles of border fencing it has committed to. About 70 miles of fencing is slated for the Texas-Mexico border.

Basham blamed the higher cost of fuel and steel and a shortage of labor. He said he could not guarantee that the fencing would be constructed by the end of President Bush’s term in office.

In a statement, Texas Border Coalition Chairman Chad Foster urged Congress to reject any request by the Bush Administration for an additional $400 million. He called the $50 billion border fence project “wasteful.”

While some sections of the wall were originally slated to cost $3 million a mile, Foster said he had heard that costs along some stretches were now exceeding $16 million a mile.

“It would be a taxpayer travesty for Congress to reward DHS for its inability to control spending and appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars more of the public’s money for them to waste,” Foster wrote in a letter to House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.
 
“DHS’ failure to appropriately supervise and control construction costs is reaching legendary status,” he added.
 
Foster, the mayor of Eagle Pass, pointed out that DHS recently paid contractor Kiewit Corporation $48.6 million to fill in a canyon with over 2 million cubic yards of earth near San Ysidro, Calif.
 
He also claimed that a lack of attention to detail in the construction of fencing in Nogales, Ariz., had resulted in more than $8 million in damage to private property when an ill-designed structure created severe flooding in nearby neighborhoods and businesses.

The project was engineered to place a wall inside a storm sewer in Mexico without permission from the government of Mexico or the International Boundary Water Commission, the U.S. agency charged with approving such border structures, Foster charged.
 
Foster said the TBC is also greatly concerned about a plan to build removable fencing along 14 miles of the Rio Grande in Roma, Rio Grande City and Los Ebanos in Texas. The fencing has to be movable because a permanent structure could, in the event of a hurricane or tropical storm, cause flooding in Mexico, thereby violating an international treaty.

Foster said the movable wall would be made of 89,000 steel bollards, each 18 feet above ground. Each bollard, filled with concrete to 10 feet high, would weight about 1,700 pounds, he said. To achieve its goal of removing the wall during a hurricane, Foster said, DHS would have to haul away 151 million pounds of unwieldy pipe filled with concrete in 24 hours.
 
“No one with experience managing an evacuation in advance of a hurricane believes that the DHS plan has any foundation in reality,” Foster said. “DHS planners have engineered a fantasy.”

In his remarks at the Brownsville news conference, Burnam said he was particularly concerned about the environmental damage a border fence would cause. He said he and other lawmakers visited the Sabal Palm sanctuary in Brownsville, which would be fenced off under the federal government’s plans.

“The Valley is a major destination for eco-tourism and has been since before the term was coined,” Burnam said. “A border fence would cost $8 million to the sanctuary alone. This will completely undermine the work that has been done to restore the river corridor.”

Another legislator to speak at the news conference was state Rep. Roberto Alonzo, D-Dallas. Alonzo had a similar view to Burnam. “I feel, like others, that this is bad for Texas business and the economy. It is a waste of taxpayers’ money and it is an environmental disaster. Instead of building walls, we should be building bridges to our neighbors to the south,” Alonzo said.

Alonzo said that although he, Burnam, and state Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, who also spoke at the news conference, were not from the border, they knew something about it.

“We feel there should not be a wall, there should be bridges. In times past I have called it the Wall of Shame,” Alonzo said.

“We are finding out the wall is not a necessity. You don’t fix border security by building a wall, you fix it by doing what we should have done, passing comprehensive immigration reform. Just as we tore down the Berlin Wall, we should tear down this wall.”