Sanford Nowlin
Bexar County Choose Peter Sakai offers a speech after successful the race of take the county’s high elected workplace.
Bexar County Choose Peter Sakai and Travis County Choose Andy Brown have collectively launched a committee of political heavyweights to discover the decades-old thought of connecting Austin and San Antonio by way of passenger rail.
The brand new, 24-member Central Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee held its first assembly earlier this month. Members together with former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, District 6 San Antonio Councilwoman Melissa Cabello Havrda and Amtrak Authorities Affairs Director Todd Stennis reviewed a draft constitution for the group.
“The fastest-growing metros should leverage this second to construct a contemporary transportation system to serve the financial, environmental and public security wants of all central Texans,” Brown mentioned in a press release.
The group’s subsequent assembly is scheduled for Monday, June 3.
Sakai and Brown first teased the concept of working collectively to discover a answer to visitors alongside the dreaded I-35 hall in a December social media video. In that clip, Sakai mentioned he and his northern counterpart had been “working collectively in order that we will get Travis County and Bexar County to get all of the followers to observe the San Antonio Spurs with out going via IH-35.”
The committee’s inaugural assembly additionally comes after pro-rail advocates, together with San Antonians for Rail Transit, RESTART Lone Star Rail District and the Texas Rail Advocates, have lobbied native lawmakers to re-explore the concept of connecting the 2 fast-growing metros.
“It is crucial that frequent and reliable rail service occur, not solely within the brief run between Austin and San Antonio, however alongside the size of the I-35 hall from Dallas-Fort Price to Laredo,” Texas Rail Advocates President Peter LeCody mentioned in a press release. “With solely highways for journey selections we face a way forward for delays, delays and extra delays in roadway visitors on this fast-growing state, and that is not a plus for a very good economic system.”
It stays to be seen how the Central Texas Passenger Rail Advisory Committee will differ from the Lone Star Rail District, an earlier committee that sought to attach SA and Austin. Regardless of tens of millions in marketing consultant charges pouring into the mission, not a single piece of rail was ever laid, and the mission was scrapped in 2016.
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