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TxDOT Tyler District DOTcast -- Texas Department of Transportation|Special Edition: NETRMA: Stimulus Money Spent Wisely on Toll 49 Episode
From TxDOT's Statewide Podcast: Loop 49, a proposed outer loop to Tyler, languished on the drawing board for more than 40 years from a lack of funding. While a lack of funding put Loop 49 in good company with thousands of other projects across the state, a local partnership between TxDOT's Tyler District, local cities and counties and the newly formed North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority found a unique way to move the project from the drawing board to groundbreaking. The first segment of what is now known as Toll 49 opened to traffic in August 2006, and the second followed in Decemer 2008, but funding again slowed development of further sections to a crawl. But this past March, the Texas Transportation Commission, TxDOT's governing body, closed the funding gap by approving nearly $39 million in stimulus funding to pay for the next segment. For more on TxDOT's first fully automated rural toll road, I spoke with Jeff Austin III, chairman of the North East Texas Regional Mobility Authority. For more information on the NETRMA and the plans for Toll 49, log on to www.netrma.org.
[ Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:59:00 -0500 ]
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