Cuts to highway budgets leave short-term future bleak

PHARR — A pothole-ridden stretch of Sugar Road may be a beneficiary of a bit of good fortune in highway funding.

But it will probably be the only one for a while.

Using money saved from other projects, the Hidalgo County Metropolitan Planning Organization hopes to widen and rebuild Sugar Road between Sioux and Owassa, said Director Andrew Canon.

The $4 million project would tie into work that the city of Edinburg did between Trenton and Owassa to rehab the notoriously bumpy road.

A connection on Business 83 in Donna to the new international bridge is also a candidate to benefit from cost underruns on projects funded by the federal Recovery Act.

Beyond that, Canon said, work will be almost non existent in the near future — the Federal Highway Administration has cut more than $8 billion from its budget.

The cuts sliced $742 million out of the state’s budget.

“It’s going to kill a lot of our projects,” Canon said. “The coffers are pretty dry.”

It also puts Canon in a position of compiling a long-range plan required by the FHA without a real clear idea of how much money he has to spend in the next 25 years.

He said he’ll “shoot low and overdeliver,” a lesson he may have learned from the Sugar Road project.

Both Edinburg and Pharr were disappointed last year when funding originally slated for Sugar Road dried up last year due to budget cuts.

“We’re staying as pessimistic about the numbers as we can,” Canon said. “We don’t want to be overly optimistic and then have to come back and say, ‘We’re not going to be able to do any of this.’”

Jared Janes covers Hidalgo County government, Edinburg and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4424.