by BRAD ROLLINS
Hays County will chip in $5 million to help Travis County build a long-awaited highway that would connect FM 1626 in Hays County with Mopac Boulevard in Austin, under an offer approved in Commissioners Court this week.
Hays commissioners unanimously approved a resolution that both pledges the funds and asks the state to remove the highway, Texas 45 SW, from its own drawing board and instead let Travis County build it as a county road.
The tough part might be getting Travis County commissioners to go along, despite the apparent support of Judge Sam Biscoe. Yielding to environmentalists’ concerns, Travis County commissioners in May 2010 asked the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization to remove Texas 45 SW from its 25-year master plan with only Biscoe dissenting.
Resizing the road to a two- to three-lane county road – instead of a four- to six-lane major highway – will slash the project’s price tag from as much as $92 million to as little as $20 million. It will also allow the counties to forgo a lengthy environmental review process like the one that has kept the widening of FM 1626 in Hays County in limbo for years.
As it had been planned, Texas 45 SW “in all likelihood would not have been done at any time in the near future and by near future I mean the next 10 to 20 years,” said Hays County Pct. 3 Commissioner Will Conley, who holds Hays County’s lone seat on the CAMPO board. “I think we’ve come up with a reasonable, practical, affordable solution where we can be out turning dirt hopefully in the next year.”
Pct. 2 Commissioner Mark Jones, a Kyle Republican who represents Hays County’s burgeoning suburban communities clustered near the Travis County line, said the anticipated widening of FM 1626 will be far less effective without construction of Texas 45 SW.
“Without (State Highway) 45, you lose the benefit of 1626. It will still bottleneck at Brodie Lane,” Jones said.
In 2007, an average of 14,100 drivers per day crossed the Hays-Travis county line on FM 1626, according to CAMPO traffic counts, en route to or from home and work. CAMPO planners expect that number to grow to 40,500 by 2015 and 48,500 by 2030.
Texas 45 SW has been in various stages of planning since at least 1985, when the Texas Transportation Commission approved an order establishing Texas 45 as an outer parkway circumventing Austin. In 1997, Travis County voters approved $3.3 million in general obligation bonds earmarked for the projects and, in 2003, that county and Hays County completed purchase of the necessary right-of-way for the road’s intended alignment.
In order to complete Texas 45 SW as a county road, the state would have to agree to give Travis County back the right-of-way.
