There's a battle brewing in Denton County -- Highland Village, specifically -- over the Texas Department of Transportation's plans to expand FM 2499. At the DFW Regional Concerned Citizens Web site today, there's a post about how the farm-to-market road, which will intersect with IH-35 near FM 2181, was originally scheduled to be "a two-lane oil top road."
Only now, say the Concerned Citizens, it's "planned as a 4 lane road with plans to expand it to 6 lanes," with "much of it ... elevated 11 feet above playgrounds and residents." There are other issues as well -- chiefly, the amount of cars now scheduled to drive on the expanded roadway, the increased speed at which they'll be allowed to travel, the amount of pollution they're expected to give off and the road's proximity to three tributaries of Lake Lewisville:
The current route selected is the most costly route. The budget for this project was recently doubled! The most environmentally dangerous route requires doubling the budget because of the necessity of constructing costly bridges over Lake Lewisville's fragile ecosystem.I swear all this sounds so ... I dunno ... familiar? --Robert Wilonsky
