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Newsroom
2/19/2008
The city of Cedar Park was given a check for a half million dollars this morning. Congressman John Carter (R) hand-delivered the federal money, which will go towards improvements to FM 1431, just east of the 183-A toll road.
City Councilman Mat Powell and other city officials received the check from Congressman Carter at the 1890 Ranch Shopping Center, which fronts the section of FM 1431 slated for expansion. “This is a very busy interchange, since the toll way was completed,” Powell says. “We’ve got a hospital that has just been completed here, and we’re standing in the middle of a large new retail center.” Powell says the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority did complete some improvements to 1431 as part of constructing 183-A, but he says the widening and introduction of new intersections needs to continue to extended eastward for public safety reasons.
The total cost of re-vamping the approximate mile of road is estimated at just over $8 million. Powell says the $500,000 in federal funding, plus almost a million in voter-approved bond money will go towards designing an engineering costs. Powell says the city will then have to reach out again to CAMPO, TxDOT and the federal money to help with construction. “We find that projects are a lot easier to get funded if you can go top them and say , ‘the design is done, we’re ready to build’, ” says Powell.
The $500,000 check was part of the 2008 Omnibus Spending Package, signed by President George Bush late last year. Technically, Congressman Carter says the money presented to Cedar Park is an “earmark”, a word Carter says has received some un-deservingly bad press. “I’m very proud of all of the earmarks that we do, and we publish them all,” Carter says. “It’s the ones that people use to line their own pockets or other people’s pockets that are bad.”
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