File photo
File photo
Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization wants to free up $633 million for the Interstate 35 Capital Express Central project.
According to the Austin Monitor, the news agency reported that CAMPO is asking for more time to decide which projects it is going to defer in order to make sure the money is available for the I-35 project. The CAMPO Transportation Policy Board will not adopt a final list of projects that will be deferred until it meets June 8.
The redesign to the highway includes adding two lanes in each direction between U.S. Highway 290 East and Ben White Boulevard. The redesign will also lower the interstate to below-grade through Central Austin, the news agency reported.
“It’s my expectation that when this work happens … we’ll be able to do it in a way that has demand-managed lanes similar to what we have on MoPac,” Mayor Steve Adler told the newspaper. “There’s nothing we can do to better take people out of their cars and better support climate change mitigation than to actually have a viable means for creating transit along that I-35 corridor.”
At the meeting, Adler criticized CAMPO's process, calling it arbitrary and ambiguous, but the agency's short-term planning manager, Ryan Collins, said that would be fixed soon, the news agency reported.
Tom Wald, executive director of the Red Line Parkway Initiative, is worried that CAMPO will divert funds away from Category 7 funds for the I-35 project, calling it "problematic." Category 7 funds are supposed to provide for both active transportation projects and transit projects and roadways, according to the news agency.
Several others were also concerned about the diversion of funds, including Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt.
“This isn’t opposition to the I-35 project so much as it is a question mark of anxiety around whether we truly have a plan moving forward or whether we’re just going to continue to do, sort of, the path of least resistance which is no longer tracking with what the probable future for us looks like,” Eckhardt told the Monitor.
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