ISSUES POLICY Lack of Action Could
Leave Rural Texas Roads in the Dust
A
By Austin Brown III, TSCRA Marketing Committee chair
RECENT ANNOUNCEMENT BY THE TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION (TxDOT) to start converting asphalt roads to gravel has a lot of ranchers worried. Safe and well-maintained farm-to-market and
rural-ranch roads are the lifeline of the Texas cattle industry, and I fear this proposal could leave us literally in the dust. It’s easy to put all the blame on TxDOT for this predicament. We are
all aware of the issues landowners have experienced with our state’s transportation department over the years. But, I’ll go out on a limb here and say they aren’t solely to blame. During the third and fi nal special session of the 2013 Texas Legislature
lawmakers fi nally passed legislation to help fund TxDOT. That’s a good thing because, as you well know, our state population is growing rapidly. This means more vehicles on all of our roads. What’s bad is the legislation fell billions of dollars short of the funds
needed to maintain the roads we have. What’s more, it forced TxDOT to make $100 million in cuts. The legislation also called for a constitutional amendment to be passed by Texas voters to initiate much of the funding, but this election will not occur until 2014. TxDOT needs more money. Finding this money is the hard part. With a lack of necessary dollars, TxDOT has only 3 choices. They can
do nothing to those rural roads that are in need of major repairs. They can fully pave and repair a select few roads and do nothing to the others. Or they can stretch their dollars as far as they can and temporarily turn those deteriorating paved roads into gravel roads. This would make them slightly safer in the short term, but it is still not a long-term solution. At this point TxDOT has opted for the third choice. The roads they’ve
initially proposed to convert to gravel are in 4 counties in South Texas and 2 counties in West Texas, totaling around 85 miles. These roads are in
88 The Cattleman November 2013
thecattlemanmagazine.com
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