PRIMERA — It’s been a rough ride — and still is — for 1930s-era Primera Road, but as of Wednesday change is in the wind.
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño Jr. and Precinct 4 Commissioner Gus Ruiz, along with Primera officials, announced an inter-local agreement between the county and city to re-pave and widen both Primera Road and Burns Road.
“This partnership … will allow the City of Primera to complete the projects for approximately $600,000 and realize a savings of over $1.4 million,” Ruiz said in a statement.
For residents of Primera, the road projects have been a dream always in the future.
“It’s been a long time coming for this road to get fixed, now it’s getting done. … Everybody involved, I would like to thank everybody, and hopefully this is the beginning that we can continue improving Primera from here on out,” said Mayor Jorge Ledezma.
Small city it may be, but Primera has undergone dramatic growth in the past decade. According to the 2020 Census, the population here is now 5,257, a 29-percent increase from 2010. Also, a major housing development is currently on track which will add even more residents.
The new paving will cover about a mile of Burns Road and about 1.25 miles of Primera Road, both areas located west of the city. Project planners say they hope the improvements will not just smooth out the roads, but help mitigate flooding problems which have hit the city hard.
“Primera Road, it consists of removing the existing concrete pavement that’s there and kind of going with a more modern, up-to-date type of standard roadway facility, widening it out for safety purposes, and also improving the roadside ditches, cleaning, re-grading and shaping the roadside ditches,” said Chris Rodriguez, an employee at GDJ Engineering. “As part of that also, replacing some of the driveway pipes, especially ones that on some of the driveways are lacking.”
Rodriguez said much of the same is in store for Burns Road, which also will be an overlay and will be widened, and ditches will be cleaned, re-graded and re-shaped.
“As you all know, funding is not always available all the time, so it’s very important for Cameron County, in my opinion, and it’s very important in the opinion of the Cameron County Commissioners Court, that as county government we reach out to our small communities and we help,” Ruiz said.
“Weather permitting we should be in and out in, how long Chris? About two weeks? No? It’s not two weeks, it’s not two months, it’s going to possibly be, weather permitting, anywhere between five to eight months,” Ruiz said to laughter from the crowd.
Former Primera mayor Pat Patterson said his city has worked for the road rehabilitation project announced Wednesday for some time.
“This road here has been on a project list for the last six years,” Patterson said. “It took a long time, they had to get the money to do it, but I thank the (county) mayor today and the commissioners today that they did pass the resolution to get this done.”
Treviño referenced the two flood events that severely impacted Primera residents, saying lining up funding to help alleviate situations like Primera’s is frustrating for all involved because things take time.
“For those two years running you had two 500-year storms one year after the other,” Treviño said. “Gus and I said, how in the heck can they call it 500-year storms if we’re going to be having them every year?
“It’s tough. Because we see the need, we know that the need is here all throughout Cameron County …,” the judge added. “We have a dollar to spend and we have literally ten thousand, or a hundred thousand dollars, worth of need. How do you get that dollar to cover all that? You can’t, you can’t. So you do the best you can.”
