MARFA — While the smoothing of Marfa’s pothole-laden streets is still a ways down the road, progress is being made by the city’s engineers who attended a City Council meeting last week to present project updates.
Council members Mark Morrison, Mark Cash and Travis Acreman attended in person while Mayor Manny Baeza joined via Zoom to hear from Andy Vecellio, an engineer with JACOB | MARTIN.
Tackling the city’s rough roads — arguably the top citizen complaint — has been on the council’s agenda for years. In 2022, they took out a $2.1 million tax note for repairs, which still needs to be spent. After an initial engineering firm the city hired didn’t work out, they hired JACOB | MARTIN for the job.
In January of last year, the city received notification of a $500,000 grant award for street repairs to W. Madrid, S. Kelly and S. Abbott streets around the Marfa Housing Authority from the Texas Department of Agriculture. The city recently put out bids for that separate project and hopes to complete construction on those streets by August.
Another seven streets — identified by city staff — have been selected for repair and will be financed with the $2.1 million tax note. The top five streets, detailed below, are priorities and will be designed and bid out by the engineering firm, while the other two will likely have to wait to be repaired at a later date when more funds become available.
- Russell Street from U.S. 90 north to Columbia Street, excluding work in the railroad right of way
- Mesa Street from U.S. 90 north to Lincoln Street
- North Gonzalez Street from Columbia Street north to 3rd Street
- East Galveston Street from U.S. 67 east to South Dean Street
- 3rd Street from State Highway 17 west to Austin Street
- Summer Street from Lincoln Street north to Columbia Street
- Edinburg Street from U.S. 90 north to Sacramento Street
The total cost of the projects is $3,198,000, with repairs to Russell Street alone costing $1,050,000. Whether or not Union Pacific will take the opportunity to use the city’s contractors to fix their parts of the street where right of ways are present remains unclear.
Vecellio said JACOB | MARTIN recently surveyed the seven city streets and collected core samples which revealed that the problems with the crumbling asphalt lie beneath the surface.
“Looking at the streets and the types of cracks we were seeing, we definitely thought there were subsurface failures,” Vecellio said. “What is below the street surface is almost like native material. Usually with streets you have surface, you have base, you have subgrade. The base [here] is basically native materials, which is not a good foundation for a street surface.”
Vecellio explained that solutions like hot mix and other surface treatments will not be effective due to the lack of a solid foundation. “If the problem is underneath the surface, replacing the surface won’t create any solutions,” Vecellio said.
He said that the most cost effective, practical solution is to remove the top 8 inches off of the streets and replace it with new material. The engineers also discovered that the city’s worst streets targeted for repair are experiencing serious drainage issues. Streets by the Marfa National Bank, for example, tend to pool with water. “Water is the biggest enemy of pavement,” Vecellio said.
In order to address the problem, a master drainage plan was created to allow for water to be redirected to streets with existing ditches or to Alamito Creek, for example. Rather than install traditional curbs and gutters, the city will utilize “inverted crowns,” where the lowest point is at the center of the street, and “concrete valley gutters,” to control water flow.
“The water will hit this pavement, it’ll come to the center, and we have a concrete valley gutter in the center, that’ll carry the water away,” Vecellio said. “Therefore it’ll push it to the next street. And then, long term, as you keep redoing new streets, it’ll keep pushing in that direction.”
But because city street repairs will be gradual, engineers included flared concrete sections at the end of each street so that water will fan out onto the next street instead of concentrating in one spot, Vecellio said.
The design phase is the next phase of the project, he explained, and the streets project could be put out for a bid as early as July 2025. From there, construction is planned to start in January 2026 and be completed by July 2026.