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EDINBURG — Officials here celebrated another win in the yearslong effort to improve stormwater drainage by breaking ground on a new phase of Hidalgo County’s Main Drain system Thursday morning.
The groundbreaking, which was held alongside a portion of the current North Main Drain along Rogers Road in Edinburg, was hosted by Precinct 4 Hidalgo County Commissioner Ellie Torres.
“It truly is a wonderful day here at Precinct 4 in Hidalgo County, as we are here to celebrate a groundbreaking — a mini-groundbreaking — of a very, very important drain,” Torres said to a crowd of local dignitaries and drainage district officials.
The $1.8 million project will focus on expanding the earthen canal from Mile 17 1/2 Road, about one-quarter mile east of McColl Road, to about 2,000 feet north of Monte Cristo Road.
It picks up where a previous improvement project recently left off.
“There’s another portion to this expansion that was made available through funding by U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-Brownsville, who awarded us $3.7 million of his earmarked money. And we celebrated that groundbreaking … a couple of months ago,” Torres said.
“And that started over by Canton (Road) … if you can envision where Canterbury Elementary is at, right about there,” she added.
The canal will be widened from 100 feet to 300 feet, turning it into something Torres has previously characterized as a “water highway” that will be able to accommodate larger volumes of runoff.
And that will ultimately have regional implications, Torres said.
“I don’t know how many of you understand this, but 70% of Hidalgo County drains into this Main Drain system,” she said.
And that runoff eventually makes its way through a larger interconnected system that aims to keep flood waters out of homes and businesses.
The Main Drain system consists of a network of canals sprawled across Hidalgo County that ultimately connect with drainage systems in Willacy and Cameron counties, where stormwater is eventually shunted into the Laguna Madre.
Three primary canal systems, called the West Main Drain, the North Main Drain and the South Main Drain, collect water throughout the northern half of Hidalgo County and run primarily through Edinburg before connecting to Willacy County.
Currently, plans are underway to expand those cross-county connections as part of a larger $400 million project called the Raymondville Drain.
In southern Hidalgo County, smaller municipal drainage systems connect to the International Boundary and Water Commission Floodway as it makes its way eastward to the Arroyo Colorado, which passes through the heart of Harlingen before spilling out into the bay.
Officials in all four Valley counties have been steadily working — since the historic storms of 2015, 2018 and 2019 — to make drainage improvements where they can.
As Torres put it, they’re “chipping away” at a gargantuan task.
“This is a collaborative effort, drainage improvements,” Edinburg Mayor Ramiro Garza Jr. echoed during Thursday’s ceremony.
“It’s just like the Commissioner mentioned, she put it best: We’re chipping away at the challenge that we have in our growing community,” he added.
And unlike the dozens of similar projects, which cities like Edinburg and Weslaco — and even the county itself — have funded via hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds, Phase 1 of the North Main Drain expansion will come at no additional tax burden.
That’s because the project has been funded using federal COVID-19 relief dollars via the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA.
“COVID had a negative impact on many of us, but there was also a silver lining to COVID in that it brought opportunity and it brought funding. And in this case, with ARPA funding, it allowed for stormwater management,” Torres said.
The project is expected to be completed in 180 days.
