Cleburne
Edwards calls Texas 121 highest priority
U.S. Rep. Chet Edwards, D-Waco, said Thursday that the Texas 121 project will be his highest priority.
“I think it’s so important for Cleburne and Johnson County,” Edwards said. “It will be in this and coming years number one as far as area projects for me.”
Plans, long in development, have called for extending Texas 121 from its current location in Fort Worth to Cleburne. The toll road will be known as Southwest Parkway in Tarrant County and Chisholm Trail Parkway in Johnson County.
Plans to break ground on the project appeared imminent in late 2008 and early 2009. Local officials became alarmed last year, however, after rumors surfaced that funding for the project might be diverted to other projects in Tarrant County. Cleburne and county officials contacted state Rep. Rob Orr, R-Burleson, state Sen. Kip Averitt, R-McGregor, and traveled to Washington, D.C., to visit with Edwards.
“Several community leaders came up to Washington last year and said they were worried about Johnson County getting cut out,” Edwards said. “I try not to throw my weight around very often, but I talked to quite a few people at the North Texas Tollway Authority, Texas Department of Transportation and the Regional Transportation Commission.
“Over half the state’s transportation dollars comes from Washington, and [Texas] got a huge infusion of money in the stimulus bill.
“One of the things I wanted to work in is that there’s no way Johnson County is going to get cut out. I think that’s rock solid.”
An award of stimulus funding last year to construct interchanges for the Texas 121 extension in Fort Worth and Cleburne proved vital to the project, Edwards said.
“I know there are other questions, but I think those two [interchange] projects were very important,” Edwards said. “I worked closely with NTTA, RTC and TxDOT, and let me tell you, they did some very creative things to move money around to do some things for the rest of the area. They couldn’t put all the stimulus money into those two interchanges if they hadn’t have done something for somebody else. So they really did work very hard on that.”
Progress on the project, at least in the near future, probably would not have occurred without the interchange funding, Edwards said.
“Both are critical components of getting the rest of the parkway project built,” Edwards said. “Getting $143 million in the stimulus bill, that’s the only way this was going to get funded. Without that, and the $2 billion that Texas got from the stimulus bill for transportation, there’s no way this would’ve have been funded. They would have been so short of money that anything new would have been dead on arrival, which is hard when you have a growing county.
“You know, we’re paying a price for lack of infrastructure investment in Texas. The truth is, the federal share since 2001 has gone up dramatically. Even before the stimulus funding, it had tripled. On the state level, with the exception of the $2 billion bond proposal they passed, state funding has actually gone down from 2001 to 2009.”
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