The provision of safe, high-quality, local, road networks for citizens is one of our core County responsibilities. In my first year as a County Commissioner, I learned that many local roads are in poor repair and never maintained – by anyone. The roads are often unpaved and in many instances, unsafe for travel – especially in times of emergency.
One of the chief complaints of my Precinct 3 constituents are these bad roads, which came into being when developers sold residential lots but failed to build a road to county standards and thus the road never came into the Travis County road maintenance program. In some instances, families taking kids to school add unnecessary congestion to major roads because their neighborhood roads are so bad.
I believe that Travis County must do more to address this issue. We do have a program to fix substandard roads, but I know that the program is not being utilized. My goal is to fix the program so we can fix more roads.
I recently lead the Commissioners Court in asking county staff to undertake four tasks and to report back to us their recommendations regarding the County’s substandard roads:
- To evaluate the substandard road program to determine what changes are needed to address existing roads that should be brought into the County maintenance program.
- To prepare an inventory and prioritization of needed improvements to all the Travis County substandard roads,
- To make recommendations for an expedited, equitable expenditure of the Substandard Road 2011 and 2018 Capital Improvement funds,
To determine what federal funding or other sources of funding can be used for this
I believe we need to take a new approach to tackle the problem of substandard roads in Travis County and we have now set a process in motion for us to evaluate and implement needed changes.