TEXAS – Plan to Convert Roads to Gravel

Via: The Texas Tribune

As he witnesses the roads around his South Texas farm crumble and deteriorate, Dane Elliot is aware that he is both a victim of the problem and part of it. The farmer and rancher in Live Oak County also owns a small trucking company that hauls oil field equipment.

“My wife works in a local hospital and she has to take our son to daycare,” Eliott said. “It worries me every day with the traffic and road conditions. It weighs on my mind, not only from a maintenance standpoint for my trucks but a safety standpoint for my family.”

The sharp increase in heavy traffic from a historic oil boom has damaged many farm-to-market roads in South and East Texas. The damage related to energy development has become so extensive that state and local authorities lack the funding to make all the repairs. Last month, the Texas Department of Transportation announced plans to convert more than 80 miles of paved roads to gravel. The conversions are expected to start Monday, TxDOT officials said. But the plan has been met with criticism from lawmakers and some of the farmers and ranchers who live near those roads.

“Since paving roads is too expensive and there is not enough funding (that’s what taxes are for, asshole!) to repave them all, our only other option to make them safer is to turn them into gravel roads,” TxDOT spokesman David Glessner said.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/08/19/conversion-of-roads-to-gravel-met-with-concern/

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