Brownsville public works crews cleaning up stretch of expressway
Crews from the city of Brownsville’s Engineering and Public Works Department are out in force this week cleaning up the I-69E right-of-way between Veterans International Bridge at Los Tomates and Stillman Road.
Assistant City Manager Doroteo Garcia Jr. said the idea to deploy department personnel to spruce up the roughly eight-mile stretch came from Maribel Guerrero, the department’s interim director, in order to address gaps in the Texas Department of Transportation’s maintenance of the corridor and address growing public concerns.
Due to budget cuts TxDOT mows the corridor four times a year rather than six times a year as in the past, he said.
“We usually rely on TxDOT to do our maintenance,” Garcia said. “We just felt that … it’s not to the level that we want it. So we’re stepping it up.”
He said the city had “undertaken a comprehensive right-of-way maintenance initiative to ensure our expressway remains clean, safe and visually appealing.”
Between 50 and 60 city employees divided into five crews are scouring the right-of-way for refuse, cleaning up curbs and sidewalks, sweeping roadways, trimming trees and bushes, repainting road markings and maintaining signs, Garcia said.
“We just signed our Municipal Maintenance Agreement with (TxDOT) that would allow us to do what we’re doing and allow us to hire other contractors, basically just to improve the level of service to our community,” he said.
The right-of-way grass is usually a couple of feet tall by the time TxDOT gets to it, which requires brush-cutting mowers, which gets the job done but “doesn’t look the prettiest,” Garcia said.
He estimated it will take at least a week for city crews to tackle the job, maybe longer, and that the department would like to make it a regular thing.
“They may be out there a little longer than a week,” Garcia said. “Just looking at the results already, we’re talking about doing this at least every six months.”
Interim Director Guerrero said the expressway cleanup project is an example of collaborative initiatives of the city that “support partnerships with our external agencies and commitment to quality-of-life projects for our residents.”
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