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Highway dedication ceremony
Staff Report
Published November 7, 2009
The completion of the most recent Texas 24 expansion north of Cooper to Texas 19 whets the appetite of Northeast Texans, particularly those in Delta and Lamar counties.
Business and civic leaders along with elected officials from both counties have been working for decades to bring a four-lane divided highway into the region with its anticipated boost to the region’s economy, not to mention safety and ease of travel.
Now we are so close and yet so far away — at least $34 million away by conservative estimates based on the $16 million it cost to build a little more than 5 miles of roadway during this latest expansion.
We’ve got 10.4 miles to go and a little more than $1 million in seed money available — some from the Texas Department of Transportation, a little federal money and about $125,000 from tobacco settlement money Delta County has set aside for the remaining stretch, according to Don Wall, long-time Lamar County highway funding guru and governor-appointed board president of the Sulphur River Regional Mobility Authority.
State Rep. Mark Homer, D-Paris, created more than a bit of enthusiasm Friday when he told about 100 people gathered outside Cooper for a ribbon cutting ceremony that he has verbal commitments both from the top official at the Texas Department of Transportation and the Texas Speaker of the House to push funding for the project through the 2011 Texas Legislature. And, we can usually depend on the senior member of the U.S. House of Representatives — our own Congressman Ralph Hall of Rockwall — to finesse some of the money Texans pay in gasoline taxes back to us in District 4.
But with politics nothing is a guarantee and Homer gave no absolute assurances — just fuel to keep the fire going. Let’s just keep stoking the fire until a completed Texas 24 highway corridor satisfies our hunger.
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