Ten long years seemed too long for a wait, says San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg who is heading to Washington D.C. to lobby for a major transportation infrastructure project in the city.
In a statement, the San Antonio Mayor’s Office said that the city has yet to get any grant that would be able to cover a major infrastructure and for which reason Mayor Nirenberg hinted at making representations before the U.S. State Department of Transportation Raise Grants.
Mayor Nirenberg is specifically setting sight on a major federal transportation grant that would see a trail system move from the drawing board to reality. Valued at $25 million, the grant being lobbied by the San Antonio mayor would be used to defray the cost of constructing the Zarzamora Creek Greenway Trails Project.
“It is important to connect people for multimodal access to their employment centers into the neighborhoods,” the mayor said, adding: “It helps with quality of life and leads to the healthy and vitality of our neighborhoods.”
To be more specific, Nirenberg hinted at the $25 million grant as an essential requirement for engineering, the cost of the right-of-way, and the actual construction of the Zarzamora Creek Greenway Trail, which will connect to the 82-mile Howard W. Peak Greenway Trails System.
“This particular section of the Greenway Trails Program, the Zarzamora Street section is a really important connection to connect with our communities of color,” Nirenberg said. And those parts of the trail system that frankly have not been done yet and people have been waiting on for a long time, it shows that the entire community has invested over the Greenway Trails project over the last couple of decades. The entire community deserves to benefit from it.”
City government data had the 7.1-miles long flagship transportation infrastructure project as geographically located adjacent to the VIA Metropolitan Transit Ingram Transit Center.
The project is seen to benefit San Antonio’s historically under-served Westside communities.
Aside from lobbying for the $25 million grant, Nirenberg said that pandemic-related concerns would also form part of his priority agenda when he finally gets to meet with officials about funds under the ‘American Rescue Plan’ and ‘Jobs Act.’
“We are going to be talking a lot about the infrastructure that is needed here in San Antonio,” he said.
