DONNA — Officials here are scrambling to figure out how to salvage a sidewalk project that has remained stalled nearly six years after the city clinched federal and state grant funding that would have partially offset the costs.
In 2017, Donna was selected by the then-Hidalgo County Metropolitan Planning Organization to receive a combined $272,000 in state and federal funds to build a network of sidewalks across the city. The city’s project beat out several other municipalities that were also gunning for the federal dollars.
The sidewalks would have been laid along North Main Street, Farm-to-Market 493, Scobey Avenue and South Avenue, according to an illustration of the project scope provided by the Texas Department of Transportation.
But for reasons that remained somewhat muddled as the Donna City Council discussed the issue Tuesday, the project has lain dormant long past the grant money’s three-year lifespan.
And as the project has sat on the shelf, the cost of carrying it out has only gone up due to things like higher materials and labor costs, but also for a variable that one official characterized as a “curveball.”
As a result, what was originally slated to be a $340,000 project has now ballooned to one that is expected to cost nearly $1.1 million.
That jump in costs means the amount of money Donna will have to contribute has gone up astronomically since the grant award remains the same regardless of the passage of time or the rise in price for raw materials.
Whereas the city was originally looking at a contribution match of about $68,000 in 2017, that figure has now swelled to $786,000 today.
“My recommendation is, you know, cut our losses. “We don’t have a million … to spend on (sidewalks),” Donna interim City Manager Frank Perez said to the council Tuesday evening.
However, representatives from TxDOT and the MPO — which has since merged with two Lower Valley MPOs to create the Rio Grande Valley MPO — urged city leaders to reconsider.
They urged Donna to make one more “last ditch” effort at saving the project.
“I don’t know the finances of the city and it’s certainly none of my business but I certainly would hate to see $340,000 of free money given back to the federal government and not used,” said Andrew Canon, executive director of the RGV MPO.
Canon explained that the MPO — and he, in particular — is responsible for distributing federal funds that have been competitively awarded.
“I certainly don’t want to go back to the board and have to let them know we have funds that are gonna be lapsing,” he added a minute later.
Neither Canon nor Donna city officials explained what caused the yearslong delays in getting the project off the ground since its 2017 funding award, however, the MPO director did shed light on one delay that presented itself about a year ago: a railroad crossing.
“At the time the application was submitted, nobody took into account that (Rio) Valley Switching … was gonna have very particular line items that would have to be met to have a pedestrian crossing across the railroad tracks,” Canon said.
The special considerations needed to create a pedestrian crossing across a railroad has added to the project cost, Canon said, referring to the discovery as a “curveball.”
Nonetheless, the federal award was meant to be put to use by 2020 and the railroad crossing issue was discovered more recently than that.
When asked by members of the city council if the project scope could be altered in order to more easily make use of the grant funding, Canon said no.
“The problem that concerns me on changing the scope was that it was done on a competitive basis with other city entities and if we change the scope … then I’ve sort of slighted them on what the possibilities were for their project,” Canon said.
Despite the three-year deadline having long since passed, Canon said the MPO still has options for keeping the funding viable.
“Whatever we need to do should have been done yesterday. … Like I said, it was supposed to go away two years ago and we’re trying to hold on,” Canon said.
So now Donna is left to figure out how to complete the entire network of sidewalks as originally planned — but at a much higher cost to its residents — or to abandon the project entirely, as suggested by the interim city manager.
Reached for comment afterward, Canon said MPO officials plan to meet with the city later this week where he hopes a resolution can be found.
Perez did not respond to a message seeking comment for this story.
“At the end of the day, it may be just that it doesn’t work out, but I sure would like to try to push that horse one more time before we give away a quarter-million dollars,” Canon said to the city council Tuesday.
