Joe Cantalupo, vice president with K Friese and Associates, the company managing the realignment project, said Hays County and the Texas Department of Transportation are discussing which entity will fund an environmental impact statement related to the realignment of the road. Those discussions are ongoing, but property owners within the large swath of land expected to contain the realigned road have been asking about the road’s exact alignment.
Cantalupo said KFA will work with the county, city and property owners within the potentially affected area to gather ideas about where the road should go. The aim of the discussions will be to determine a specific route on which to build the realigned FM 150.
Hays County has selected Corridor C as the best area through which to build FM 150. Due to mounting development pressures in the area, the county is getting more and more requests from property owners curious about the exact alignment of the road. The county will work with the city of Kyle and property owners to expedite the selection of an exact route.[/caption]“It doesn’t bring the project any closer, but what it does is add a little bit of predictability as to where the [road] might go,” Cantalupo said. “So the county and city and property owners can get on with planning.”
Cantalupo said the project will still go through the federally mandated National Environmental Policy Act, which will include public outreach. The Commissioners Court's May 17 action is intended to "jumpstart" that public outreach, he said.
The project was originally slated to require an environmental assessment aimed at identifying and mitigating the project’s potential effects on the environment, Cantalupo said. The project now requires an environmental impact statement, or EIS, a longer, more comprehensive document with the goal of disclosing potential effects on the environment and how to mitigate them.
The project will use $100,000 of the $650,000 originally budgeted for the environmental assessment to determine the specific route.
Cantalupo said there is no timeline for when the specific route will be chosen, but he said he "can't imagine it taking more than a few months."
“The real big driver behind this is all the growth and development pressure in that area of the county,”Cantalupo said.
The FM 150 realignment is expected to improve safety and reduce congestion, officials have said.
