The sentiments of the crowd at Tuesday’s El Paso City Council meeting were overwhelmingly against putting the extension of Redd Road back in the city’s master thoroughfare plan.

But the vote by City Council was 5-3 in favor of it.

The council majority acted with the expectation that a new bridge across the Rio Grande will be needed by 2025 to accommodate increased traffic and with the knowledge that it would take 10 to 12 years to get the $73 million project approved and federally funded.

But the city plans to commission a new Upper Valley traffic study in 2017 to see if the traffic problems predicted in a $657,000 study this year actually exist then. (Download a graphic summary of this year's traffic study below)

If not, the council and City Manager Joyce Wilson promised, they city will not proceed with the extension of Redd Road.

Wilson said the tensions that now exist between Upper Valley residents, developers and the city are being felt all over the United States today because so much farm and ranch land is being sold for residential development.

“This is a painful process that all areas are going through as they suburbanize and urbanize … and it will be no less painful in five or 10 years than it is today,” she said.

About 50 Upper Valley residents attended Tuesday’s meeting, the large majority of whom opposed the revival of the Redd Road extension on official maps of planned streets.

West Side city Rep. Ann Lilly offered the motion to reverse the action City Council took in 2004 when, under pressure from residents and the Save the Valley Neighborhood Association, it erased the extension from future plans.

Because of that action five years ago, the city had to return $6 million in federal funds that had been set aside for the project.

Since then, Lilly said, the population in the area that Save the Valley has been trying to preserve between Country Club Road and Artcraft Road has grown by 66 percent.

That area had 1,944 residential parcels and 6,221 residents in 2004, she said, and now has 3,236 residential parcels – not all of which have been built on – and an estimated 10,355 residents. She later said those numbers came from the city’s Planning Department.

Lilly was joined in voting for the extension by city Reps. Susie Byrd, Carl Robinson, Steve Ortega and Beto O’Rourke.

Voting no were Reps. Rachel Quintana, Eddie Holguin and Emma Acosta, who presided over the meeting as mayor pro-tem in Mayor John Cook’s absence.

Former Upper Valley resident Al Weisenberger complimented Lilly for her courage in taking on the traffic problems that literally drove him out of the Upper Valley.

“This is a tough question for this council,” he said. “We have a very vocal set of opponents who are well organized and who are trying to keep this from moving forward.

“I lived in the Upper Valley … and moved from Tennis West because the traffic became unbearable. Unbearable. These people can’t stop development. When you’re coming down Country Club at 5, it’s a nightmare. That’s not saving the Valley, that’s ruining the Valley.”

Save the Valley’s president Mary Frances Keisling later said there is little undeveloped acreage left and just 600 vacant residential lots between Country Club and Artcraft.

The 2,000 or so new people those houses may add when they’re built will not create enough traffic to justify spending $73 million to take 17 properties, demolish three homes, extend Redd Road, build a new bridge and widen Gomez Road to Upper Valley Road.

“We will fight them next at the MPO,” Keisling said afterward, referring to the Metropolitan Planning Organization.

The MPO’s transportation board will be asked by the city to add Redd to transportation maps and, eventually, to schedule funding for the extension.

Addressing the Upper Valley residents who came to the meeting, Holguin said, “I sympathize with the people here. People in the valley here I live have constantly had to fight the city.

“I understand what you people have gone through.”

He contended that if the connection between Redd and Gomez roads won’t be needed until 2025 then it shouldn’t go back in the plan now.

Minutes earlier, Holguin had asked City Engineer Alan Shubert to repeat why he and the city staff had recommended reviving the Redd Road extension after the council had approved the traffic study recommendations in May without putting Redd Road back.

“We don’t need it now,” Shubert said. “We think we will need it in 2017, and we will definitely need it in 2025.”

Quintana said she hesitated to support the extension because it isn’t needed yet.

“There are many things needed in my district, and this might take away from what is needed in my district today,” she said.

O’Rourke apologized to Upper Valley residents who who could not have known that the Redd Road issue would be coming up again so soon after City Council in May approved the recommendations in this year's traffic study. It was generally understood at the time that the Redd Road extension would not come up again until a new traffic study is conducted in 2017.

But, as Shubert and other city staff members said, if it becomes necessary to have the Redd Road extension in place by 2025, preparations need to start by putting Redd back in the city’s thoroughfare plan now, O’Rourke explained.

“The politician in me would love to put this off for someone in the future, but the realist in me knows we have to take care of this today,” he said.

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To reach David Crowder, write to dcrowder@epmediagroup.com or call (915) 351-0605, ext. 30, or 630-6622.

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