After serving on the Jersey Village City Council for four years, Rod Erskine was elected as the city's mayor in May. Since then, he has continued to focus on the issues that have been central to the city throughout the past two years, including attracting businesses and maintaining quality of life for residents during the Hwy. 290 expansion.

"There's a lot of angst over the Hwy. 290 expansion," he said. "I helped organize the noise abatement petition campaign. I've gone to the public hearings and made comments. I have been in communication with our representatives. I was really able to talk to people about what I thought we could do."

Erskine, who works as a geoscientist in a management position with an oil and gas company, has been a Jersey Village resident for 27 years. He said being in a leadership position comes naturally to him.

"I'm not afraid to say what I think," Erskine said. "I also am used to working with budgets and revenue structures. I believe my experience in these areas will help me take Jersey Village in the direction it needs to go."

How has the transition from city councilman to mayor been?

The biggest difference is going from being a council member with someone else running the meeting to actually facilitating the meeting. While I do participate in the discussion, I need to make sure the meeting runs smoothly and there's a full discussion with council. I want to make sure all the questions get asked that need to be asked.

One of the things that's made this transition easier is that we've got a very good and diverse City Council. We've got people with law enforcement, engineering and business experience, and each one brings a different perspective to each issue. We've got an excellent city manager and very capable city staff. Council doesn't run things day to day. We're all volunteers. The city manager is the guy that really runs the city with his department heads. We're lucky that these guys know the ropes.

What are the top challenges facing the city?

The Hwy. 290 expansion is the top challenge. I am very disappointed as far as the noise abatement goes. Putting longitudinal tining over the concrete will reduce noise somewhat. The wall TxDOT's proposing to build will be good for the residents in the very immediate vicinity, but we were hoping for more. We hired a firm that specializes in environmental issues to do some modeling and check TxDOT's models, and we feel there's more that could be done. This freeway is literally in Jersey Village. If they expand again, they can only come our way. It's important that we try to get some noise abatement beyond what the federal guidelines are.

There are other issues that go with the expansion. We're going to have to require right of way for our utilities. That's going to be a costly process. We're going to end up in court on a number of those properties. That's the subject of a lawsuit with TxDOT and, at the end of the day, we may get reimbursed for that. But we have to budget for the worst case scenario.

There are the interim traffic issues we're going to have when they start working on the toll road interchange. We've had people go out and count cars during rush hour that cut through Jersey Village to get to Jones Road and it's in the hundreds per hour. It's only going to get worse when they start shutting those lanes down.

We still don't know the full impact of losing the property TxDOT has taken for their easement, and the businesses that had to shut down as a consequence. We've lost about $40,000 per year in revenue form property tax. The sales tax loss is an unknown. There was a Jack-in-the-Box, Jack's Carpet, a Chevron station, McDonald's, Wendy's and a Meineke Muffler, just to name a few businesses, that had to close down.

How is the development of Jersey Crossing coming along?

Council is deciding how we would like Jersey Crossing to develop. We recently had a workshop with a proposed development plan for one tract that includes warehouses, but council is not in favor of warehouses. We're still working with that particular landowner and his architect. The challenge is that there are a lot of land owners down there. If they could come as a group with a bigger proposal it would be a lot easier to work through, but as of now they aren't actually working together.

The good news is, we're not under the gun to have that developed because we are actually financially quite sound. We realized a surplus the past four years, and this year we project another surplus. We don't have debt that exceeds our revenue. We can go some period of time without collecting any revenue at all and still be solvent.

How is the city planning for the future?

One thing I think we need to do is work on attracting businesses. Anecdotally we hear that Jersey Village is a hard place to do business. We want to be a place where people want to establish their business because of location, environment and security, compared to alternative locations in the unincorporated area up Hwy. 290. We need to spend some time talking to current business owners to get their perspectives on the pros and cons of being here.

We also need to update our comprehensive plan to help our city staff. Staff wants to proceed in the direction that council wants them to go, but our current comprehensive plan was drafted in 1989, so our long-term vision isn't clear. Rather than having staff guess what we want them to do and react to month-by-month feedback at city council meetings, we're really looking for longer term direction.