A slew of new road and transportation projects could be under way soon in Bastrop County, thanks to money from the Texas Department of Transportation and the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization.
The Bastrop County Commissioners Court voted Monday to select three projects to fund with $2.3 million in federal funds from CAMPO’s Surface Transportation Program – Metropolitan Mobility toward three transportation projects in the region.
The first – and at $1.9 million, the most expensive – of these projects would improve a new Capital Area Rural Transportation System transit stop in downtown Elgin, and add improvements to support bicycle and pedestrian connections along 2nd Street between Veterans Memorial Park, the transit stop, and the Texas 95 N CARTS Park and Ride. The other two would fund an update to the City of Bastrop’s Thoroughfare/Transportation plan and the second phase of the Bastrop County Comprehensive Transportation Plan for $160,000 and $281,000, respectively.
Those three projects received the highest score under the project criteria developed by CAMPO, said commissioner precinct two Clara Beckett, who sits on the CAMPO committee. Given the amount of money available, they made the most sense to fund.
“We’d love to get grade separations on Highway 71, but the dollars weren’t there,” Beckett said. Those two projects, work that would be done on Texas 71 at Loop 150 and at Texas 95, would cost $19 million and $45 million.
That said, given the amount of money CAMPO was divvying out and the relative population of Bastrop County, Beckett said the county “fared extremely well in terms of funding.”
The CAMPO board voted last week to provide funding for three other Bastrop County projects. Transportation-related fire recovery received $960,000 from the board, while a U.S. 290 signal synchronization study in Elgin received $40,000 and an FM 1100 engineering study received $292,500.
Federal funds from CAMPO require a 20 percent local match, county planner Rachel Clampffer told the court, but Bastrop County had been successful before in applying for a waiver that would allow them to exchange work done on the state bridge system for their match.
In October, TxDOT approved $28 million for a U.S. 290 Safety Project and Hurricane Evacuation Route, which would turn U.S. 290 in part of the county into a divided highway with a median. Beckett said she was hopeful they would get funding in 2013 to finish the split along the rest of the county’s portion of the highway.

In other business, the commissioners:
 Authorized the county judge to sign a memorandum of agreement with Travis County that would allow for Bastrop County to evacuate inmates from Bastrop County Jail to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office’s correctional facilities in the event of an emergency, and vice versa. The agreement provides for the sending agency to provide all logistical support and extra costs incurred by the receiving facility. Sheriff Terry Pickering said his office had agreed with its Travis County counterparts to take in inmates during the Bastrop County Complex Fire in the event that the jail had to be evacuated, and that since the fire, Travis County had been signing these agreements with surrounding counties in order to house its inmates in the event they had to be evacuated.
 Approved the acceptance of a Homeland Security grant for $17,252 for a FireCAP project that would do wildfire risk assessments and implementations at close to 50 properties in nine different Bastrop County subdivisions, work that could hopefully serve as a model for mitigation on other properties.
 Established four additional positions on the Community Recovery Committee to allow one representative from each of the main utilities affected by the Complex Fire – Bluebonnet Electric, Aqua Water and WCID #2 – to have a representative. The fourth additional spot was allocated to a representative from Texas A&M University, which is conducting studies in the county in the wake of the fires.
 Approved an interlocal agreement with the Texas Department of Transportation pending legal review for the county’s debris contractor TFR to process debris and trees from within the TxDOT right of way on Texas 71 and Texas 21 and FM 1441.