The Redd Road extension is back again, and to members of the Save the Valley Neighborhood Association, the proposal going to City Council on Tuesday is another do-or-die issue.
Save the Valley President Mary Frances Keisling said the fact that the extension is on the agenda again now is also a betrayal because she and others thought they had won the fight in May.
That’s when the council approved a $657,000 traffic study that recommended the extension of the Redd Road across the Rio Grande by 2025 but not until a new study had been done in eight to 10 years.
“They voted on the thing in May and everyone approved it,” she said. “It pushed the Redd Road question to 2025, but its back on the agenda again five months later. It leaves us distrusting our City Council. How can they approve a plan and then come back and change it five months later?
“As citizens, we are constantly having to fight with our own City Council over what we want in our part of town. This is not right.”
In 2004, the council rejected a plan to go forward with a project estimated at $73 million to extend Redd Road over a new bridge on the river to Gomez Road by removing the extension from the city’s major thoroughfare plan.
Though not everyone in the Upper Valley agreed, Keisling’s organization – backed by petitions and letters with more than 1,900 signatures – made the case that extending Redd would mean the unnecessary destruction of homes and old neighborhoods and would ruin a new city park.
The city’s Engineering Department is recommending that the council put the extension back in the thoroughfare plan so the city can apply for federal funds to cover part of the cost of designing and then building the extension.
City Rep. Ann Lilly, who represents the Upper Valley and has spoken in favor of the extension, said “it’s just a housekeeping deal.”
“I didn’t start this, and I’m not pushing it,” she said. “I did not realize in May that this would even come up again. I thought it was over for me.”
But if the bridge is to be built and the road extended by 2025, she said, the city Engineering Department says Redd needs to be put back in the city’s thoroughfare plan now.
“It’s a procedural thing,” she said. “Then in eight to 10 years, they’ll look at it again.”
But Ted Marquez, the assistant city engineer in charge of traffic, said the plan City Council approved in May did recommend the extension but called for a new Upper Valley traffic study in eight years or so to see if the projections and recommendations in the 2025 plan approved in May are still correct.
“What we are doing is planning to have the opportunity to seek federal funds for this project for the planning, the design and the construction of it,” he said of the extension. “We don’t believe we can do anything before 2017. The period of construction is after 2017 and to have it done by 2025.”
The next traffic study, he emphasized, is not intended to address just the Redd Road situation but to re-examine the entire Upper Valley for traffic purposes.
As Marquez sees it, the extension will be needed to reduce traffic congestion between Artcraft and Country Club roads and will be built unless City Council decides not to do it.
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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 630-6622.
