HOUSTON -- With its Victorian houses and 1920s bungalows, the Heights is a neighborhood where time, it seems, stood still.
But change may be coming just around the corner.
Last month, the Texas Transportation Commission added $88 million to TxDOT's stimulus construction plan, to rebuild several bridges and add new ones to complete a feeder road system on I-10 inside the Loop.
The idea is to fix those feeder roads that don't really feed.
"It is just one of those things about the Heights," said Mary Ann Marucci who has lived in the neighborhood for years. "That's the way it is and that is OK. It's never been a problem."
The plan is on the fast-track because the contracts need to be out by March.
Residents were caught off guard.
"I just have never heard anything. It would be nice to have some kind of public forum," says Marucci.
There were public hearings on this project -- in 2003. The plan was part of the massive Katy Freeway project.
The Citizen's Transporation Coalition has already sent a 19-page letter to TxDOT opposing several elements of the project.
The White Oak Bayou Association is also lobbying against the TxDOT plan.
That is because several of the bridges, as they are designed, fall in the 100-year floodway.
Floodway issues have been high-profile the past several years since the City of Houston passed the so-called floodway ordinance and many land owners saw their property values dive to next to nothing.
The ordinance banned any construction in the floodway.
It has since been revised to allow some construction as long as flood mitigation is built somewhere else in the area.
The TxDOT plan does something more than build and rebuild feeder roads and bridges. It would also create a retaining wall that critics say would keep White Oak Bayou from being able to spill into I-10 as a last resort in a major flood.
That is just what happened during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.
"That doesn't make any sense to me at all. Why would you not have the last roadway be the last spillway?" asked Marucci. "Is it going to go into the neighborhoods? In Houston, that is taking a huge chance."
TxDOT says it is planning to do a flood control project with at least two large detention ponds. But they are not attached officially to the construction and will not be funded by stimulus dollars.
Privately, some TxDOT officials have suggested that part of the flood control project could lag years behind the construction.
There will be a public meeting with TxDOT about the project on Wednesday, January 6. It is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. at Stevenson Elementary at 5410 Cornish.
