in Houston, Texas

Continued from page 1


The projects in Brooks, Live Oak and Armstrong counties are just a fraction of the $2.2 billion for Texas transportation coming out of the nearly $800 billion Congress has agreed to pay out to try to jumpstart the nation’s economy – or at least to try to keep the recession from getting any worse.

The work in Brooks County, which Ramirez expects will take about three years, is estimated to create 1,500 additional jobs, something he says are needed there. (The county’s raw, unadjusted unemployment rate for February was 6.6%, about even with the statewide rate.)

It’ll also relieve traffic congestion on a route that has grown heavy with trucks hauling goods northbound from manufacturers in Mexico to Wal-Marts, Best Buys, shopping malls and car dealerships across the U.S.

The work has been in the planning stages for 20 years, Ramirez said.

The funding for it was lined up a few years ago – or so local leaders thought, the judge recalled. Then came news in 2007 that TxDOT had made an accounting error worth $1.1 billion. Their project was nearly derailed.

But they kept plugging away at it -- Ramirez and a group of county judges from neighboring counties who called themselves the “U.S. 281 Coalition.” They met with Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa, the Mission Democrat, and got pledges of support, the judge said.

There are plans in the works to make part of the 281 project a toll road, though Ramirez also pointed out that the state legislature could put the brakes on new toll roads before its session wraps up in a few weeks.

Click here to see a fully interactive map of TxDOT stimulus funding in each county, or click here to search the complete database of every TxDOT-approved stimulus project in each county.

Whither I-69

Whether or not the refurbished, spiffier version of U.S. 281 in Brooks County will become a part of I-69, no one knows for sure. That’ll be up to the feds sometime down the road, no pun intended.

“I can't tell you today, ‘Yes, 281 and 77 will be I-69 at some point,'” said Chris Lippincott, a TxDOT spokesman. “We're gonna do the things that we can to get those roads to interstate quality. It may be that they become part of a corridor that is eventually designated by the federal government as I-69.”

Both U.S. 281 and the nearly parallel stretch of U.S. 77, closer to Corpus Christi, are being eyed as possible routes for I-69.

(There already is an I-69, of course, it’s just not in Texas. At least not yet. It runs only as far south as Indiana.)

“The Rio Grande Valley is the largest population area in the country that is not served by an interstate,” Lippincott said. “You don't have to have a very long conversation with business leaders or others from south Texas before they tell you that … The upgrades that are coming to south Texas have been lines on map and unfulfilled promises for too long.”

Some other big items approved by the Transportation Commission for south Texas include $36.5 million to build a toll road in Cameron County connecting U.S. 77 with the Port of Brownsville, and $31.5 million for the Cuatro Vientos Road project in Laredo, intended to alleviate traffic congestion from truck traffic crossing the border.

Continued on page 3: How Texas Watchdog did its analysis

[ad#ad1forposts]