Hidalgo County leveraging every dollar for road improvements

EDINBURG — As the Rio Grande Valley continues on a trend of explosive growth — particularly in Hidalgo County — so, too, does the need for road infrastructure to keep up with increased traffic.

To that end, county leaders have partnered with the Rio Grande Valley Metropolitan Organization, or RGV MPO, to leverage local dollars to their maximum capacity in conjunction with state and federal funding.

According to Precinct 1 Hidalgo County Commissioner David Fuentes, for every quarter-dollar that the county contributes to a highway project involving the MPO, it reaps at least three times that in return.

“We’re investing a quarter, we’re getting 75 cents from the state, federal dollars to build and expand these roads to provide greater mobility,” Fuentes, who also serves as the vice chair of the RGV MPO board of directors, said during a county commissioners’ court meeting on Tuesday.

Currently, the county has partnered with the RGV MPO on more than two dozen projects across the county, from Peñitas east toward Mercedes and north to the Delta.

“Our local investment is roughly $100 million. And I just want to highlight that this is the culmination of years of work,” Fuentes said.

“This is vision. This is building projects over the course of many years. And it takes time for us to develop these things,” he added a moment later.

For that $100 million, the RGV MPO has dedicated another $506 million in tandem.

Together, they have contributed $606 million toward 28 projects.

In all, nearly 67 new miles of roadway will be built. It’s the hope that the projects will ease pressure on some of the county’s most congested travel arteries.

But the funding is still not enough.

Between the time it takes to see a project through from concept to completion, and the limited amount of federal appropriations that are allocated for Valley projects, the funding is falling short.

“We do not have enough money assigned to these projects because, as inflation goes, as the years pass us by, the cost of construction and the cost of these improvements continue to grow with time,” Fuentes said.

Just one-third of the 28 projects are fully funded, according to the presentation that Fuentes delivered on Thursday.

For the remaining 20 projects, the MPO will fall a little more than $70 million short on funds, according to figures from the presentation.

Nonetheless, Fuentes was proud of the progress that has been made thus far.

“All the improvements that we make to better our communities for a better quality of life, for economic growth, because this also provides pathways for people to get to expanding our economy, residential developments, commercial developments. All of this is incorporated into these monies that we are putting into our local participation,” Fuentes said.

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