Through the Texas Department of Transportation’s regular planning cycle, planners with the organization conducted a public meeting in Comfort to discuss rural planning for Kendall County.
Kendall County is in a unique situation, housing two kinds of regional planning organizations with TxDOT, with the city of Boerne being lumped in the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization and the rest of the county falling in the Alamo Regional Rural Planning Organization.
Darcie Schipull, a planner with TxDOT, explained to the roughly dozen people who attended the meeting at the Gaddis Memorial United Methodist Church in Comfort on Tuesday evening that rural planning organizations are reserved for counties or municipalities with a population less than 50,000 and are not required. However, she said being part of a rural planning organization can grant municipalities access to greater project funding through TxDOT.
However, a major point addressed in Tuesday’s meeting was centered on the growth projected to hit the rural area of Kendall County, with TxDOT projecting an additional 104,434 residents hitting just the rural portion of the county by 2050. This would put the county well beyond the typical 50,000-person population cap for rural planning, considering the county is already nearing that number with just under 48,000 residents reported in the 2020 census.
Another key component of the TxDOT presentation was the benefits afforded to counties by working with other municipalities, including neighboring counties or cities housed within the county.
While the rural planning cycle sits on a four-year update cycle with the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, Tina Geiselbrecht, program manager with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, urged the audience members to think about projects that would serve the community beyond the four-year planning cycle. Geiselbrecht urged those participating to consider potential conflicts or trade-offs and to cooperate with cities within the county or working jointly with neighboring counties on projects.
This led to an important aspect of the planning process when an audience member asked, with consideration of the growth projected to hit the county, whether there was any form of long-range planning mechanism afforded to the rural planning organization similar to that of cities.
Schipull said there were challenges with such longrange planning created by state law, adding that counties have little power to plan outside of major thoroughfares. Geiselbrecht said this was where the benefit of working with the city to develop thoroughfare plans is beneficially, saying this would avoid instances where the city may develop a wider road in its limits leading to a bottleneck narrowing in the county or vice versa.
Without naming the controversial and shot-down Kendall Gateway Study of yesteryear, Schipull suggested this was an example of how transportation planning can fail if the city, county and state are not working together or on the same page. She said this was an example of longrange planning that was not a positive thing.
The TxDOT study, which included a Boerne bypass commonly referred to as the “Highway 46 loop,” was released in 2018 to wide opposition from the community, citing environmental issues and problems with the map lines which ran through several private properties.
This kind of localized yet regional planning is being conducted by the county and city, as the countywide transportation committee is working to compile transportation project recommendations for all municipalities within the county, including the cities of Boerne and Fair Oaks Ranch and the unincorporated portions of the county.
At the end of the presentation, the audience was invited to make notations on three maps – one map was for bike and pedestrian project recommendations, another was for mobility and connectivity recommendations and the final was for safety concerns.
The two presenters said they would be filtering through these recommendations to identify projects on TxDOT roads that weren’t already on a project list. They added that while some of the projects recommended at a similar meeting five years ago may not have shown up on a schedule yet, Schipull still has a working spreadsheet, adding the projects don’t disappear but get shifted around a longer list moving up or down based on priority and several factors. Several of the recommen
Several of the recommendations posted on the maps weren’t unfamiliar, including several recommendations to Highway 27 in Comfort, the intersection at Farm-to-Market Road 289 and Interstate 10 and the unincorporated Farm-to-Market roads like FM 473 and FM 474.
Several residents sought projects where SH 27 runs through downtown Comfort, seeking to redirect traffic to FM 473 or to add traffic signals and crossings to make pedestrian shopping in the downtown area safer. Additionally, several county residents wanted to see improvements made to the intersection between FM 289 and I-10, noting a need to widen the bridge at the intersection and improve the turnaround under the interstate.
Another key point made during the presentation Tuesday was the large mileage of state-maintained roads outside of a metropolitan planning organization and TxDOT’s focus on funding projects for these rural roadways.
Geiselbrecht said 15 percent of the Texas population lives in rural areas, but she said of the state agency’s project funding, TxDOT plans include spending $4,200 per rural resident in Texas. She said this was 33 percent higher than the state average in terms of spending per person, which she said indicates TxDOT is “investing more” in rural citizens.
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