1982-03-17 Regular Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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r: • Minutes, Regular Meeting, La Porte City Council March 17, 1982, Page 3 5. Mayor Meza recognized Mr. Steve Richards and. Mr. Jack Hoff- man, Consulting Engineers representing the Texas Department of Highways and Transportation. Richards: First of all, I would like to brief you on some work we are doing for the Highway Department. In the course of this work we have identified three special concerns which we need to bring before the Council tonight and get some input from them. Let me start out with those two objectives. I guess, to begin with, I'll give you some background information. The State Department of Highways and Public Transportation, through their District 12 office, several years ago installed traffic signals at five intersections along Main Street in La Porte: Main at SH 146, Main at 8th, Main at 4th, Main at 2nd, and Main at Broadway and San Jacinto Street. I believe that intersection is called Five Points, locally. It is Highway Department policy to assume full responsibility for maintaining such traffic signal installations in small towns. Small town meaning below 15,000 population. As you are probably aware, La Porte has passed the 15,000 mark, and in keeping with De- partment policy, we are turning the responsibility for main- taining the signal system along Main Street over to the City of La Porte. The County will actually do the maintenance, I believe, through an agreement La Porte has with the County. But it will be the City of La Porte's responsibility to up- keep these traffic signals. Before the Department actually turns over these signals to the City they are going to up-grade and modernize these signals. It will be paid for completely by the Highway Department. There will be no cost to the City of La Porte. My Company, Walton and Associates, has been engaged by the Highway Department to do the preliminary engineering studies for upgrading the system and the design work. Let me brief you with some of the problems with the present system and why the Highway Department feels that they should .upgrade and modernize the system before turning it over to La Porte. Richards presented slides of East Main and then some of the Five Points intersection showing the old signal heads and proposed to synchronize the lights on East Main to provide a better flow of traffic along Main. He stated the new elec- tronic control equipment would be installed to save the City of La Porte some money in repairs. He stated there aim was to bring the traffic signals up to date with other equipment through the state. He stated there were basically 3 areas where he needed Council input before he could finalize plans. •