Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, it is rumored, may be coming back to Texas to run for governor in 2010. If so, she may have to face some angry conservatives who are peeved over the senator’s efforts to find some wiggle room in the border fence project.

Hutchison voted for the fence a year ago when desperate Republicans wanted to show middle America it was doing something to keep Mexicans out as the mid-term 2006 elections loomed. Since then, the Texas senator has been trying to nuance the border fence project, insisting that the federal government take into account the input of border communities  before it puts up the dang thing.

The latest from Kay Bailey: She slipped in a provision in one of those massive spending bills Congress always passes to keep the clocks going at all of those federal agencies that are indispensable to our way of life. Hutchison’s provision would tweak the 2006 border fence law to allow the Homeland Security secretary to dispense with fencing and physical barriers in those areas “where he deterimes those resources are not needed.”

Hutchison’s dig? She wants to make sure that the feds listen to local officials, including Border Patrol chiefs, on where the fence should go, but don’t worry fence fans, the senator is not against the construction of the thing, lest she get disowned by her fellow GOPers.

“Sen. Hutchison believes Customs and Border Protection can better make decisions about resource allocation along the border than members (of Congress) who have never been to the region,” said the senator’s spokesman, Matt Machowiak, in an AP story. Gee, that would cover most of the Congress people, you know, the ones who have never been here but are always clamoring for securing the border.

And further wiggle room possibilities emerged this week as well when The Monitor reported that Homeland Security is considering combining the famed fence with a much-needed levee repair project in the RGV. Combining the two is the brainchild of county judges J.D. Salinas of Hidalgo and Carlos Cascos. The concept seemed like a longshot given the current national political mood to keep extraneous Mexicans out of the U.S.

A manager with one of Hidalgo County’s larger drainage districts tells The Monitor that he expects Homeland Security to move forward on a design that combines the fence project with levee repair. County judges Cascos and Salinas says it makes the most sense to combine the two projects, with higher and fortified levees acting as a more natural barrier to keep Mexicans out while protecting the Valley from catastrophic-like Katrina flooding that left New Orleans awash.

Anti-fence forces shouldn’t get too encouraged, however, because some conservative natives in Washington of the GOP variety are getting restless to get the fence up, all 700 miles of it as specified in the 2006 bill. Talk of levees being used as part of the fence system isn’t going to make the immigration restrictionists happy. They want a fence, come hell or the high water of catastrophic flooding over the well-worn levees in the RGV.

Opposition to the fence is strongest in the RGV along the U.S.-Mexico border. No such opposition exists in southern California and Arizona, where the intertwining sort of business and cultural relationships that we have here are largely absent in those parts of the border. Hutchison and other Texas political leaders are pushing for more local input, leading DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff to say that “we want to be open to negotiate.”

Chertoff says he’s open to “alternative solutions” in looking at the fence project. The same has been heard from Valley Border Patrol Sector Chief Ron Vitiello, who after initial reservations about the fence-levee idea, now says the concept is aligned with what his agency is looking at for security purposes.

Finding some wiggle room amid the political clamoring for a border fence won’t be easy. Thanks to Hutchison and Valley leaders making their voices heard, perhaps a bit of light is getting through the talk show chatter.

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