About TEXAS EASEMENT ACTION ALLIANCE
The Texas Easement Action Alliance (TEAA) works to educate landowners and communities to support efforts that protect Texas life and land from risky fossil fuel projects, like the proposed DeLa Express Pipeline. Bold works with communities all across the country to form Easement Action Teams.
Emma Schmit, Pipeline Fighters Director at Bold Alliance and Education Fund, is the lead staffer who works with states, landowners, legal teams and local organizers. Contact: emma@boldalliance.org
Miguel Escoto, Jay Mania and local organizers work with landowners and communities in Texas.
Miguel Escoto, Landowner Organizer
miguel@txeasement.org
Phone: 915-500-9751
Jay Mania, Landowner Organzier
jay@txeasement.org
Phone: 432-895-2787
Our first priority is to support landowners and communities on the frontlines of these projects. We believe landowners should have the ultimate right of what does and does not happen on their land. We believe land justice starts with protecting property rights and ending eminent domain for private gain. We work with landowners fighting to protect and defend their lands, while simultaneously building and deploying a committed alliance of organizations, lawyers, lobbyists, and issue experts working to enable long-term, positive legal change.
Challenging a multi-billion dollar corporation isn’t easy—or cheap. To work around these problems, we developed the Easement Team Model under which experienced leaders provide guidance and insight to landowners and interested community members on action they can take against unconstitutional landgrabs on the local, state, and national level. At the same time, landowners can obtain counsel from a vetted attorney to fight for their interests in legal proceedings.
The Texas Easement Action Alliance will support landowners in developing best practices for dealing with calls, letters, and visits from land agents. After retaining an attorney, the corporation seeking to take your land is required to communicate through your attorney unless otherwise requested.
Action Alliance members will also be invited to webinars and in-person meetings where they will receive the latest updates, get answers to any questions, and be provided a network of support to make navigating the pipeline process as simple as possible.
While the goal is always to protect your land and property rights by resisting unwanted and unnecessary chemical pipelines, the Texas Easement Action Alliance will keep folks abreast regarding if, and when, it may eventually be necessary to negotiate easement terms. This would occur only if and after all other efforts at legal protections have failed.
If a project is approved and an easement is unavoidable, we will work to negotiate the best uniform terms for all Texas Easement Action Alliance landowners using expertise from decades of easement negotiations so that landowners can have the best protections possible.
The Easement Action model is built around a simple but powerful truth: when landowners unite, they can stop even the most well-funded pipeline projects.
Instead of facing pressure from multi-billion dollar pipeline companies alone, landowners come together to form a legal and strategic alliance. By pooling resources and staying united, landowners create a solid front that pipeline companies can't easily divide or intimidate.
This approach flips the usual script. Companies rely on isolating landowners, pressuring them one on-one, and rushing through eminent domain proceedings. But when landowners are organized— sharing updates, strategy, and legal support— they're no longer vulnerable targets. We're a collective force with leverage and power.
This model has already proven its effectiveness in multiple pipeline fights across the country from West Virginia and Tennessee to Oregon and South Dakota. In Nebraska, unified landowners helped defeat the Keystone XL pipeline, winning back their land and setting precedent for resisting eminent domain abuse. Landowners in Illinois, Iowa, and South Dakota also used this model to stop hundreds of miles of unwanted carbon pipelines threatening their private property rights.
After more than a decade of implementing and improving this method of pipeline opposition, we’ve seen one thing again and again: a scattered group of individuals can be steamrolled, but a united landowner front can stop a pipeline in its tracks.
TEAA is a part of a network of Easement Action Teams, a project of Bold Education Fund, that work in numerous states to handle outreach and education efforts with landowners.
Over the years, Easement Action Team landowners have also worked with various attorneys who have represented landowners across the Midwest and around the county in eminent domain battles, pipeline fights, and carbon dump site opposition. They have mounted landowner legal challenges to proposed projects and handled hundreds of lawsuits, including constitutional challenges and condemnation litigation.
Attorneys working locally with Texas Easement Action Alliance members include Chris Johns, lead partner at Cobb & Johns.
Chris represents individuals and businesses as they confront powerful interests on the other side: property owners in disputes with the government, landowners in eminent-domain cases, and others with an important cause in a civil trial or appeal.
Chris has won cases for clients in courts across the country—from state and federal trial and appellate courts to the U.S. Supreme Court. He also served as an adjunct professor at the University of Texas School of Law, where for seven years he taught an upper-level course on property rights and eminent domain.
Chris received his J.D. with high honors from the University of Texas School of Law, where he was editor in chief of the Texas Law Review and a member of the Chancellors honor society. He received Dean’s Achievement Awards in several of his classes.
Chris appears on the 2018 through 2024 lists of The Best Lawyers in America, a peer-selected honor. Texas Super Lawyers Magazine has named him to its “Super Lawyers” lists for every year from 2013 through 2023 and to its “Rising Stars” lists in 2013 and 2014. Chris has testified about property rights on invitation from the Texas Legislature, is a regular speaker at national and state CLE conferences, and has received multiple pro bono service awards.