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$lB project to upgrade highways in Grapevine, Southlake I WFAA.com I Local News: TV Page 1 of2
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$lB project to upgrade highways in Grapevine, Southlake
03:58 PM CDT on Thursday, March 26, 2009
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER / The Dallas Morning News
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INTERACTIVE MAP: General area of the highway improvement
project
AUSTIN - The State of Texas agreed Thursday to spend
nearly $1 billion to reconstruct a tangle of highways in
Grapevine and Southlake, promising relief for hundreds of
thousands of motorists who drive through those cities and to
Dallas/F ort Worth International Airport.
The project, decades in the making, will rebuild main lanes and
frontage roads for up to 16 miles along State Highways 114
and 121, and will also add between one and two managed toll
lanes in each direction. It's an engineer's nightmare, involving
six separate highways and seven interchanges, and promises to
be a major headache for drivers when construction begins later
this year.
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Some businesses have already closed in anticipation of the construction, said Grapevine Mayor William
D. Tate.
Nevertheless, he called the project a "life-changing event" for the people of northeast Tarrant County.
And dozens of North Texas leaders traveled to Austin today thank the department - arid Gov. Rick
Perry - for supporting the project. In the past 60 days, TxDOT has approved major highway projects
for North Texas that are worth more than $7.5 billion, an incredible sum even by costly highway
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$lB project to upgrade highways in Grapevine, Southlake I WFAA.com I Local News: TV Page 2 of2
construction standards.
Still, to reconstruct the lanes on the grand scale that local planners have been calling for over the past
decade would have cost more than the state can afford. The winning bidder asked for $1.5 billion to do
all the work outlined in the request for proposals. Even counting $250 million in federal stimulus dollars
approved for this project, the state has just under $1 billion available.
As a result, the commissioners voted today to get the project started, guaranteeing $600 million for a
scaled-back approach, one that will include just one toll lane in each direction along State Highway 114.
But another $350 million is set aside for the project and the department expects to negotiate with the
team of builders to expand the scope to include a bigger footprint and two managed lanes in each
direction.
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