As road grows, debate follows
Grand Parkway offers opportunity as well as concerns for residents as it heads east
Houston is a faraway place on FM 1413 in southern Liberty County, where a driver is more likely to see a pony munching on grass than a shop on the corner. If not for the trees and an electrical transmission line, the sky would be unbroken, horizon to horizon.
Everything changes about three-quarters of a mile west of
Texas 146. A tight stand of trees on each side of the road gives way to a wide swath of flat land, from which a concrete wall rises along a ramp crawling with construction workers building one of three new segments of the Grand Parkway.
It soon could look a lot more like other parts of suburban Houston where the Grand Parkway has gone, with cul-de-sacs replacing horse pastures and retail centers sprouting at major intersections.
In nearby Dayton, where the tollway offers opportunity and oppression alike, residents are quietly but amicably divided.
Asked his opinion on the construction, Aaron Potter, 66, talks about how Chambers and Liberty counties missed out on the some of the boom times in East Texas.
His wife, Margaret, shakes her head. Though the couple lives miles northeast of the tollway’s route, her friend’s church is moving because it is sitting on land needed for the road. Their country way of living is looking a little less country as earth-movers cut a new path right beside the road they have driven for 30 years.
“I’m going to miss it, some of it,” Margaret Potter said. “Change is hard.”
People are talking about the roadwork, with some certain that “it’s bringing doom and gloom” while others are more optimistic, said Ron Cauthen, whose work takes him to businesses and machine shops from Baytown to parts north.
Everyone has made up his or
her mind, he added, but only time will tell who is right.
What is undeniable is that change is coming. Work is about 30 percent completed on the three newest segments of the tollway that acts as the Houston region’s third outer ring, long sought by supporters and jeered by opponents. The project adds another 52.8 miles to the tollway, from Interstate 69 in New Caney to Texas 146 in Baytown, completing it north of Interstate 10 from one side of the Houston region to the other.
Even the word “toll” rankles some who frequently travel along FM 1960 and Texas 146, as some dig in against paying for the privilege of using a state road.
“Call it whatever you like. I pay the same,” Curt Grossman said.
The new segments cross crucial parts of the region’s freeway system, adding interchanges at U.S. 90 in Dayton in Liberty County and at I-10 in Mont Belvieu in Chambers County. Those new connections mean some motorists can bypass Houston’s twisted tangle of thoroughfares for trips between East Texas and The Woodlands, Tomball, Cypress or points beyond along Interstate 45, Texas 249 and U.S. 290.
Slow growth
Avoiding urban traffic, however, comes at a cost for both TxDOT and motorists. Building the tollway is expected to cost the state $1.44 billion, including $330 million in property acquisition, according to the most recent construction estimate.
Unlike the other segments through northwestern Harris and southern Montgomery counties — opened in 2013 and 2016, respectively — that have two toll lanes in each direction with continuous frontage roads, the eastern segment is mostly one lane in each direction with no frontage roads. Sporadic passing lanes are planned.
It is a reflection that growth is expected to occur much slower along the eastern segment, compared to parts of western and northern Harris County and southern Montgomery County that exploded with homes and businesses by the time traffic adjusted to the tollway.
Some predictions for that growth, however, came in far short of what actually sprouted shortly after the tollway started construction. Many critics think the new portions will suffer the same fate.
“I think development will follow wherever new road infrastructure is put in place,” said Frank Blake, transportation chairman of the Houston Regional Group of the Sierra Club. “As long as the local economy is healthy and the Houston region keeps growing and relying on an auto-centric model, I assume there will be continued sprawl development. As traffic got intense on I-45, I-10, and (U.S.) 290, the (Texas) 288 corridor became a development opportunity. I don’t see why this won’t happen elsewhere.”
If that happens again and rooftops rise from the grasslands, longtime critics say the tollway will only exacerbate issues of vehicle emissions, loss of pristine space and flooding.
“Expect more flooding problems and losses of wetlands and destruction or degradation of streams and their flows and where the water goes,” said Brandt Mannchen, chairman of the local Sierra Club. “We keep changing natural stream patterns to suit us, but we create more problems.”
All, Mannchen said, to fuel further development and growth in the region’s petrochemical hub
“Change can be exciting and a little scary as well. It presents us with a lot of opportunities but some challenges as well.”
Patti Jett, Dayton’s marketing and communications manager
along Galveston Bay.
“The Grand Parkway and other new or expanded roads are going to put people where the effects of climate change, flooding for instance, will do the most damage,” he said. “If you thought Harvey was bad, wait until we get a Category 4 or 5 hurricane with those winds and the rainfall of or similar to Harvey. With so many more people living in vulnerable areas, we are setting ourselves up for the ‘big calamity’ or catastrophe.”
Long road ahead
About 500 workers are spread across the segments, working in specific areas that one day will connect. Chris Neil, public relations manager for the project, said the plan is for the crews now building an overpass and connector ramps at I-69 to work their way south. Crews in Dayton are working from what is roughly the middle, making preparations for various overpasses of local streets and assorted exit ramps as they push in both directions across the pastures and prairies of southern Liberty County.
South in Baytown, workers are pushing north, laying new lanes of the tollway in the center of the existing Texas 99, which will act as the frontage road for the tollway.
Grand Parkway Infrastructure, a joint venture of construction behemoths Ferrovial Agroman, Granite Construction and Webber, won the $900.4 million building job.
The cost will be repaid by tolls assessed to drivers using the road. Through August 2019, the most recent month available, along the open parts of the tollway from I-10 to I-69 and in Baytown, the number of transactions — each time a vehicle passes a tolling point — were up 7.9 percent to 118.9 million transactions. That heavy use is a blessing and curse, residents said.
While they enjoy the convenience, residents acknowledge many people lost pristine prairie for a backyard, and flooding worries have led to rethinking some of the region’s development decisions.
Based on the current fee schedule set by the Texas Transportation Commission in October, traversing the entire route of the new segments will cost $10.31, or about 20 cents per mile.
“I’ll happily pay it,” said Mark Smith, who moved to five acres south of Cleveland specifically to put more distance between himself and his neighbors, but now laments slow rural roads that make travel time-consuming.
That is not a sentiment shared by many of Smith’s neighbors in the northeastern hamlets where Harris, Montgomery and Liberty counties meet. Many of them dread opening day for the tollway, though many said they would rather keep their worries to themselves.
Dayton, a city of about 8,000 on high ground in Liberty County, has the largest stake in the tollway because its city limits include tentacle-like extensions along the major roads the tollway will cross, including U.S. 90, FM 1960 and Texas 146. Patti Jett, the city’s marketing and communications manager, said officials and residents are anxious but also cautious.
“In reality, it is a little bit of both,” Jett said. “Change can be exciting and a little scary as well. It presents us with a lot of opportunities but some challenges as well.”
Nothing came as a surprise to Dayton or Liberty County officials, as the parkway’s path was determined years ago and plans for the scaled-down one lane in each direction advanced in 2016.
“We know that growth is coming, we have been planning for it since we got the information we would be on the receiving end of it,” Jett said.
In May, the city council approved Dayton’s first unified development code, which lays out applicable uses for property and outlines where — and where not — development is welcome. Jett said the aim is Dayton can control its growth, but boom.
“The quality of life here is good, and that is not something we want to change,” Jett said.