Outer Loop topic of latest road consortium meeting

By LESLIE GIBSON

When he stood up at the Aug. 26 Rockwall County Road Consortium meeting to speak on a road which might come through his Southern Rockwall County home, Garvin Tate appeared calm.

The Outer Loop, a connected ring of multi-lane roads circling the Metroplex, will likely come through Tate Farms, a three-generation enterprise off of Farm to Market 548.

But Tate didn’t rail about that. He expressed concern with access and frontage, which Jeff Neal, Outer Loop program manager, had said may be limited to prevent urban sprawl. Neal referred to that part of the Rockwall County as rural.

“Except for our farm, all the farms around us are subdivided or platted for subdivision. They all belong to development companies. We don’t have any chance of remaining rural,” Tate said.

In a later phone interview, Tate was just as calm. “This will be the most major change and most important development in Rockwall County since they built the lake. It will have a huge impact on the county,” he said.

Joan Ream of Heath spoke with more vigor in the meeting. She described the Outer Loop as part of a “huge land grab, that is terrible for Texas,” and said the controversial Trans Texas Corridor will overlay it.

“Trans Texas Corridor is almost entirely gone,” Neal said. (See related story, Page 6).

He and Chris Anderson are with the North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), which is facilitating the Loop’s development, and are the project managers.

They provided timelines, including a best-case expectation of 10 years before dirt turns, a broad overview, answered questions and listened to public comment in the meeting of just over an hour, dedicated solely to the Outer Loop.

It is being planned based on conditions forecast for the year 2030.

Neal regularly updates the Rockwall County Road Consortium in its monthly meetings. The mayors, council members and staff of each city in Rockwall County make up the Consortium membership, getting advice from the county’s road consultant and input from NCTCOG and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). The members developed and submitted to NCTCOG their preferred route for the Outer Loop through Rockwall County.

That route comes between Royse City and Fate, both of which signed boundary agreements contingent upon it, and roughly follows FM 548 south near McLendon-Chisholm, to enter Kaufman County.

Only Rockwall, Denton, and Collin counties, of the 16 affected by the Loop, have submitted such “County Adopted Alignment”. Collin County commissioners are so convinced of the local need, they authorized formation of the Collin County Toll Road Authority. That Authority has scheduled a public meeting for Sept. 17 to exhibit and explain the Collin County Outer Loop, which would eventually be a segment of the Outer Loop.

Such local initiatives are what make the Outer Loop development different from the now dismantled Trans Texas Corridor, which was a statewide project of TxDOT.

“This is not a single project,” said Anderson. “Communities will decide which segments move forward or not.”

Based on local need, as funding is available, existing roadways will be improved and new ones built, to be linked in a multiple-lane system to intersect with freeways which go into the Metroplex, and to connect residential areas with destination areas.

US 380 is an existing road which might become part of the Outer Loop. “Maybe US 380 might serve for many years as a good interconnector,” Neal said in the meeting.

“So we wouldn’t be acquiring any right of way,” he added. “That state of financing at this point is extremely dire.”

It would cost $25 billion to entirely construct the 250-mile Outer Loop using no existing roads, Neal said.

NCTCOG is considering the preferred alignments, as well as impacts on the environment, on historic sites, on residential and business areas, on floodplain and the like, as it evaluates mile-wide swaths in all 16 counties. From those swaths, or study corridors, the public and technical teams will select the route. That selection should begin in late 2009, early 2010, Neal said.

In general, the Loop route will be about 460 to 480 feet wide and consist of four to six general purpose lanes, four to six frontage roads where applicable, and a wide median for perhaps rail, according to NCTCOG information.

Toll roads could be part of the route, but much of it lies in light to moderate congestion, which does not support toll roads, Neal said. Also, existing taxpayer-supported lanes can not be made into toll roads, only new lanes.

Where toll roads come into play, frontage roads and number of access points may be restricted.

“We want to find a fine balance between mobility and enough access where land uses can benefit,” Neal said, noting a goal to minimize urban sprawl.

Interchanges of no less than a mile seem to be about the right length, he said.

As far as the Trans Texas Corridor, citizen reaction to that drove home a lesson to the state — involve the public and go locally.

“The whole 4,000 mile network is eliminated,” Neal noted.

“We’ve been very, very careful with this study,” he said of the Outer Loop feasibility study conducted by the Texas Department of Transportation, NCTCOG, the Federal Highway Administration, Texas Turnpike Authority and officials from the regions affected by the Outer Loop.

“We are bringing the public in to help plan from the bottom up,” Neal said. “We want to avoid impacts where possible.”

“We’re trying to stay ahead of development that’s going on out here to preserve corridor right of way and not have a lot of impact,” said Anderson in a later interivew. “We don’t want people to say, ‘Why didn’t you think of this 10 years ago?’ We want citizens to get involved and we want to get citizens accommodated.”

Tate said he has been monitoring the Outer Loop for a long time.

“We’ve been watching it for a long time. It hasn’t been widely publicized, but we knew about it. We’ve been watching it on the COG Web site and it was part of the Trans Texas Corridor plan — we never talked to anybody.”

“We expect that a lot of the land for this will be taken by eminent domain, so there is no practical way to try to stop it.”

“It pretty much has to go through between Fate and Royse City and come on down here,” he said. “The best we can tell is the route is in front of our house or through our house.”

NCTCOG maps show two study corridors, one along the Rockwall County preferred alignment, the other in Hunt County.

“The boundary is effective regardless of the eventual location of Outer Loop,” said Royse City City Manager Bill Shipp.

“We haven’t talked specifically with COG. They’ll start coming back and talking about final alignment,” he said.

“It really is always effective when you take a broader, more regional approach to any kind of a problem, certainly to transportation.”

“Transportation doesn’t recognize political boundaries,” he noted.