What were THEY thinking? Is city council REALLY rejecting a nearly $100-million gift to revitalize the whole downtown Garland area?

TXDOT is willing to pay some $100 million to untangle the mess it made of downtown Garland nearly 50 years ago including wrapping Garland High School in major traffic.

Garland is on the verge of missing the opportunity of a lifetime to fix about two-dozen major issues facing its downtown area, using about $100 million in state funds and without raising taxes on our citizens.

Astoundingly Garland City Council on Monday night at its work session turned a cold shoulder to such an offer. Council told TXDOT to cancel its planned stakeholder meeting scheduled at 2 p.m. yesterday, February 21, to talk about the proposal to reroute State Highway 78 through downtown Garland to fix those long-standing, serious matters. The meeting would have reviewed four options open to the city to fix the problems it has been facing for years without a resolution.

At first it seemed council opposed the Thursday meeting because members would be in Austin for a city-expense-paid meeting, but by the time the council session was over, their fury oddly had reached such a fever pitch that it seemed unlikely they would reschedule the meeting at all.

Ironically this rebuff of state funds happened on the very night that council took further decisive action on an upcoming $424-million bond issue that will raise Garland property taxes significantly.

By Tuesday morning state officials were reeling from the rebuff and promising to return to hold a much larger stakeholder meeting in the near future. I was in touch with several of these officials and promised to help to try to find out how something so important to the future of downtown Garland could have so easily gone off the tracks at the council session.

TXDOT has indicated a willingness to be flexible in the design, a fact along with many others councilmembers seemed to have missed.

Council's odd action sent me scurrying to our notes from the September 25, 2014, stakeholder meeting held at our home on the topic. It was one of the first such stakeholder meetings on the issue in Garland and had been widely publicized. Former Mayor Douglas Athas, former Councilmember Anita Goebel, Transportation Director Paul Luedtke, and former city council highway consultant David Dean along with about 25 concerned citizens from throughout downtown Garland were present.

With Athas and Goebel now gone from council, I realized immediately that the majority of current city councilmembers were not on council at the time of the meeting. I also quickly ascertained that most of the current councilmembers are not impacted by the issue—or at least they don't think they are—and probably have little knowledge of the history or the serious nature of the matter, despite a short briefing at council's Friday, December 15, 2017, staff retreat at a local hotel. Even then, the councilmember in whose district much of the rerouting would occur had not yet been elected.

Members of Garland's city council seem to have little knowledge of how the failed, antiquated "couplet of the 1970s impacts Garland traffic today, including the congested "Z" intersection on First Street where Highway 78 enters from Lavon then suddenly shifts to Westbound Avenue B and Eastbound Avenue D.

And some just plainly don't care about it because it is not in their district. (The irony is that fixing the issues in downtown Garland caused by the failed, antiquated "couplet" will make better things happen in other districts too, even if those councilmembers don't realize it now.)

Apparently the groundwork had not been laid properly for the current council to even discuss the issue Monday evening. So much misinformation bubbled to the surface during that council discussion that I needed to listen carefully to try to discern facts from fiction.

Furthermore, the fact that Athas, a political enemy of many on council, once supported the idea seemed to drive the opposition rather than the issue itself. Why throw out an important funding source for Garland to correct serious issues in our city just because of personal political disagreements that have nothing whatsoever to do with the merits of this case? Such personalized, illogical thinking by public servants is beyond my ability to comprehend. What is best for Garland should always drive our city council's decisions.

Despite council's action, several councilmembers said they would "not be opposed" to TXDOT going on with information-gathering and its sharing processes on the reroute of Highway 78 through downtown Garland.

Meanwhile, the downtown area languishes in major need of all that the state is offering. All the political posturing council can muster won't sufficiently cover over the gaping wounds in the area right now either. One downtown business owner told me just this week that something MUST be done to drive more customers into the core of downtown.

Some of our councilmembers don't realize that the State of Texas has been discussing the rerouting of Highway 78 through downtown Garland FOR MORE THAN 20 YEARS. It started well before every one of our current councilmembers plus former Mayor Athas ever became involved in Garland politics. It began decades ago when the state realized that the "couplet" concept through downtown areas throughout the state, not just Garland, wasn't working and needed to be fixed or replaced.

Just after this underpass, notorious as a "speed trap", Highway 78 shifts from overlaying Lavon Drive, to turning on First Street, and then abruptly turning on one ways Avenue B and D. TXDOT wants to straighten out this situation as the highway winds through downtown Garland at a cost of about $100 million, but Garland City Council is balking

The reroute proposal addresses all sorts of issues important to Garland citizens, ranging from providing more and better visibility and access to downtown Garland's Central Business District and providing vastly improved safety for Garland High School faculty, students, students’ family members that drive them to school daily in some of the city's worst traffic messes as well as for First United Methodist and First Baptist church members who attend church in Garland's "couplet".

The reroute would likely be a better stimulus to the downtown area economy than the apartments and city office buildings that the city has built—using Garland taxpayer money—trying to revitalize the city's inner core.

And the State of Texas—and not Garland's poor and overburdened taxpayers—would be footing most of the $100 million bill for this important highway reroute which has the potential to revitalize the city's inner-core and not just the city's central former Square.

And think of the tax windfall that could emerge from a truly revitalized downtown area paid for without even any city "incentives" or funds!

No councilmember seemed to realize they were rejecting an amount equivalent to nearly one-fourth of the bond proposal and which would dovetail quite nicely with some of the proposals in that bond package. Again, the $100-million state-funded Highway 78 reroute would not increase City of Garland property taxes, but the proposed $424 million bond package will.

Compounding further the situation on council Monday night seemed to be a total lack of knowledge about the history of the original rerouting of Highway 78 through downtown Garland nearly 50 years  ago and how the blunders and miscalculations then have created so many serious issues in our city today.

The city keeps trying to put bandages on the gigantic problems in downtown instead of getting to the root of them and allowing the state to fix the broken parts.

The problem started with the couplet itself, which was designed intentionally in the 1970s to divert traffic away from the downtown central business districts.

The thinking then was that "downtowns are dying" and "older neighborhoods are getting in the way of progress".

The couplet was designed to superimpose a highway over an older downtown area, bypassing important elements in an attempt to make them irrelevant.

In Garland's case, once-quiet residential streets Avenues B and D were widened and converted to one way to accommodate the heavy flow of highway traffic. The Central Business District, including the former Square, was bypassed completely.

What was "modern" then quickly turned into a nightmare for cities all across Texas, with Garland being one of them.

Suddenly:
1. Garland High School was surrounded and engulfed in heavy highway traffic on three sides, creating dangerous pedestrian and driving conditions for students, parents, and faculty. (Remember when last year at three separate times GHS students were struck and injured while trying to cross Garland Avenue, which is part of Highway 78? Those were just the most recent examples.)
2. First United Methodist and First Baptist churches suddenly discovered that traffic conditions at their front doors facing Avenues B and D respectively were highway-like, not quiet residential or respectful, and sometimes dangerous, especially for older church members who were accustomed to parking along those thoroughfares (and still do) or walking across, as in the case of the United Methodists, West Avenue B, aka Highway 78 westbound .
3. Residential homes fronting Avenues B and D and on the corners of side streets feeding into those main arteries suddenly found the noise inside those houses almost unbearable. Some homeowners reported damage to their siding, foundations, porches, and others spots due to the highway traffic. The damages are continuing to grow worse as traffic increases in the area.

 But worst of all:
1. The literal bypass of the old Garland Square led to the shuttering of businesses and deterioration of many buildings in the Central Business District.
2. Main Street from First Street to the then-Square began to look more like a slum. In fact the whole east side of the downtown area (east of the railroad tracks) began to rapidly deteriorate into slum-like conditions.
3. The crazy intersection where Highway 78 feeds from Lavon onto First Street and then Avenues B and D became a scary, complicated, snarled, and sorry traffic mess, especially during rush hour.

Then just as suddenly as the "couplet" arrived with its devastation, the folks in Austin realized their BIG MISTAKE and started to unwind it. Almost overnight downtowns across the state became valued, touted, and "in". Talk of a "walkable" city arrived.

One option for the rerouting of Highway 78 would widen and clean up east Main Street and turn it into a beautiful new entrance to downtown Garland. Unfortunately Garland city council doesn't appear to want TXDOT to spend around $100 million fixing the problems in the heart of Garland's downtown area.

Some cities such as Garland were caught in the whiplash of the changes. And that's where we in Garland remain to this day! Many cities, with the help of TXDOT, have already fixed their problems—their outdated couplets. Garland simply hasn't; we suffer from the ill-effects from it.

So can the devastation ever be undone? Can Garland's central core be put back together again in the way it once was? It's worth a try—especially since TXDOT is willing to spend some $100 million to correct the mess it created nearly 50 years ago. The solution is called "the rerouting of State Highway 78 through Garland's Downtown area".

Garland's transportation office in coordination with TXDOT and the North Texas Council of City Governments has drafted a proposal of what might work. It offers four separate options. Two are quite good for Garland's downtown district. A third is OK. The fourth is the cheapest and easiest for TXDOT but the worst for Garland.

Unfortunately, after City Council's negative reaction to the whole discussion Monday night, we may end up with either the status quo, which can't bear the predictions of traffic growth and patterns in the future, or with No. 4, which would be yet another disaster because it wouldn't really undo the mess created nearly 50 years ago—only add to it. Negative reactions such as those expressed on council Monday night will only make matters worse long term.

Garland's best hope is to face the issue head on, with eyes wide open, and negotiate with TXDOT the best plan and best deal it can get for Garland.

The best plans will:
1. clean up (by widening) either Main Street or State Street (or both) from First Street to near the central downtown area near the venerated Roach Feed and Seed.
2. Set the stage for the city to create a beautiful new entryway into downtown Garland from the east.
3. Bring Highway 78 within "kissing distance" to the central downtown area, thus bringing more customers and clients to the customer- and client-hungry area.
3. Divert the heavy traffic away from Garland High School as well as the churches along Avenues B and D, thus vastly improving the safety for thousands of Garland citizens from every council district.
4. Return Avenues B and D west of Glenbrook to more residential-like streets, perhaps even two-way streets like they used to be before the disgraced "couplet" entered the picture, thus improving values and desirability of homes in the area west of Glenbrook. (Think more tax money for the city!)
5. Eliminate or seriously transform those horrible turns and intersections at First Street and Garland Road, including that complex intersection at Garland Road at Miller near Saturn and the railroad tracks.
6. Provide us with a brand-new highway paid for with state money through the center of town, thus perhaps drawing attention away from the miserable streets in much of downtown Garland now.
7. Turn Glenbrook into a portion of Highway 78, thus quickly carrying traffic out of the downtown area and past Central Park and the planned new dog park and ADA-compliant children's playground there.
8. By swinging past the proposed new dog park and improvements at Garland's Central Park those expensive new amenities will become more accessible to ALL Garlandites from throughout our city, who are paying their tax money for those improvements.

I can go on, but you get the idea. Only the most uninformed city councilmembers would look this gift horse in the mouth and reject it. Our city has so much more to be gained by it. I personally can't think of a negative that can't be worked around in this opportunity set before us.

And just to set the record straight: Except for one home that is identified with Garland's early history, the other houses on East State Street are small, post World War II and dispersed between vacant lots—also they are easily movable. I know of no houses belonging to Garland citizens that will be destroyed by the Main Street option. Only Option 4 poses the potential of tearing up an established older neighborhood, apparently portions of Chandler Heights. I frankly can't imagine any Garland citizen supporting Option 4.

Garland citizens deserve a full, transparent, and honest evaluation of the TXDOT-initiated $100 million reroute of Texas Highway 78 through downtown Garland. They deserve to be given the FULL and COMPLETE facts necessary to make an educated decision.

All four of the rerouting solutions TXDOT is studying would get Garland High School out of the dangerous situation for students, faculty, and parents where the school is surrounded on three sides by a winding, twisting Highway 78.