Oak Hill 'Y' freeway project revived - but without tolls
Draft shows 6 or more expressway lanes on extension of U.S. 290.
The Oak Hill tollway project, delayed for a generation as development boomed to the west and traffic thickened, has been rejuvenated — and with the tolls removed.
Last fall’s sudden clampdown on toll projects by state officials, it appears, might have laid the groundwork for moving forward on a highway expansion that had stalled. Paying for the project, however, still could be a challenge.
“It wasn’t just on the back burner,” Terry McCoy, Austin district engineer for Texas Department of Transportation, said Wednesday. “It was off the stove entirely.”
On Friday, TxDOT officials will release a draft environmental statement showing six or more expressway lanes on U.S. 290 from where the current freeway ends east of William Cannon Drive to near Circle Drive, with at least four frontage roads alongside. There would be two flyover bridges connecting U.S. 290 to Texas 71 at the Oak Hill “Y,” with the freeway section on Texas 71 extending about a mile to Silvermine Drive.
The U.S. 290 freeway would be elevated at William Cannon, then dip below current ground level east of the “Y” and stay sunken until near Scenic Brook Drive.
TxDOT will hold a federally required public hearing on the project May 24, officials said, and hopes to have environmental clearance for the project by sometime this fall.
Construction could begin as soon as 2020, McCoy said this
week.
Although TxDOT appears serious about completing a project the agency touts as badly needed — interim intersection improvements completed just three years ago “are nearing the end of their useful life” because of growing traffic, McCoy said — obstacles remain.
McCoy said the project already had $62.5 million allocated to it as a tollway, and that his district can put another $125 million into it — money McCoy said had not been previously dedicated to other area road projects — for a total of $187.5 million. Still, construction will cost an estimated $400 million, McCoy said, with an additional $150 million needed for purchasing added right of way, completing final design work, relocating utilities and overseeing construction.
The added right of way will consist of about 75 acres spread across 80 parcels, McCoy said, with an estimated cost of $26.5 million.
“We’re still looking to fill that funding gap,” said McCoy, who added that removing the toll aspect “opens up the funding streams that were not available before.”
TxDOT revenue tied to two recently approved constitutional amendments, which redirected sales taxes and oil and gas taxes to the agency, legally cannot be spent on toll projects. Nor can some gas tax money that, under a 2015 state law, was put back into TxDOT’s hands after having been diverted for many years to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
State Rep. Paul Workman, a Republican whose district includes the Oak Hill area, became involved in the project several months ago after the tollway chill, according to McCoy and other officials. Aside from working with McCoy, Workman said he talked to Texas Transportation Commission Chairman Bruce Bugg about converting the Oak Hill “Y” plan to a nontolled project.
“He is receptive to the idea,” Workman said. “I’m hopeful that between now and the time we break ground that we will have cobbled together enough (funding) to do the whole project at once.”
With development booming west along U.S. 290 to Dripping Springs and in a variety of communities off of Texas 71, traffic grew 21 to 30 percent at various points in Oak Hill between 2010 and 2016, according to TxDOT counts. U.S. 290, just west of the William Cannon Drive traffic light, had 70,340 vehicles a day in 2016 and more than 51,000 west of the intersection with FM 1826.
The expansion, Workman said, “is going to be a huge game changer for us. As soon as the whole toll thing blew up, I started trying to figure out how this might happen otherwise.”
If the full $550 million for the project cannot be found immediately, Workman said, the alternative would be building only the frontage roads in a first phase, followed by adding the expressway lanes in a second phase. However, it is not clear if adding only frontage roads would improve the clogged traffic on U.S. 290 and Texas 71, and the approach also would extend by several years the duration of construction at the “Y.”
Doing the project as a nontolled highway will require action as well by the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization board. The current CAMPO longrange plan shows the Oak Hill project being tolled, and it would have to be amended for the freeway project to commence.
The potential extension of the U.S. 290 freeway (and accompanying work on Texas 71) has run hot and cold for almost 20 years, since shortly after TxDOT in the 1990s expanded the expressway to its current end near Patton Ranch Road. TxDOT and the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority, deputized by TxDOT to handle the project, first proposed building it as a toll road in 2004 and began an environmental study.
The toll project ran headlong into competing interests among Oak Hill activists, with the business community supporting the idea and environmentalists arguing for a more modest “parkway” that would’ve had no frontage roads or elevated sections. TxDOT ultimately dropped the project, a lull lengthened by the national recession that hit in 2008.
In 2012, TxDOT and the mobility authority began yet another environmental review, one attenuated by continuing opposition in some quarters, but until late last year it appeared that the authority was in line to build a tollway when final approval came. But in November, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick responded to growing toll road opposition among the GOP rank and file by calling for what amounted to a moratorium on new pay-to-drive projects.