TxDOT leadership plans to decide Thursday how it will spend federal stimulus money sent to Texas for highways and bridges. Lawmakers have demanded to know why the agency has decided to move so quickly, and with so little input from, well, lawmakers.
The list of projects released Monday night total about $2.2 billion, and will have to be whittled down to about $1.2 billion in construction projects across the state, and TxDOT has plans to spend about $500 million in maintenance work. Another half-billion dollars or so has already been sent directly to the regional planning agencies, in our case the Regional Transportation Council, TxDOT said Monday in a letter to Rep. Jim Dunnam of Waco, who leads the House committee on the stimulus.
Dunnam has called the pace TxDOT is moving to spend the money “staggering,” but TxDOT has countered that it has been talking with federal counterparts and local representatives for four months to draft its plan.