caroline mays

AUSTIN, Texas - The director of TxDOT’s freight, trade and connectivity section says she is looking for some “quick wins” as the new Texas-Mexico Border Transportation Master Plan starts to get implemented.

Caroline Mays spoke about the new plan at a recent Texas Transportation Commission meeting. 

The BTMP is a comprehensive, multimodal, binational long-range plan crafted by the Texas Department of Transportation. The 400-page plan identifies transportation issues, needs, challenges, opportunities, and strategies for moving people and goods efficiently across the Texas-Mexico border, the border regions, and beyond.

TxDOT hosted a series of meetings throughout the border region to gather public input for the BTMP. It was formally adopted at TTC’s March meeting.

Laura Ryan, a TTC commissioner, asked Mays when Texas might see some tangible results. Mays responded:  “We are under the procurement process right now. Hopefully we can complete that within the next four months. But, we are not waiting for that procurement to be done.”

Mays said she met recently with the Border Trade Advisory Committee, which helped craft the new plan.

“We started discussions with them. What does implementation look like so we can start doing some quick wins? We also have an internal TxDOT border task force made up of the three district engineers and then some of the divisions. We had a meeting with them last week also and we started discussing what are some of the high priorities they would like to see.”

Mays added: “We are already working on identifying those and moving forward and we are going to, in some instances, use some of the capacity we have in existing contracts to start facilitating advancing of some of the recommendations that the districts have already highlighted. So, we are not waiting four months to start working. We are already working it right now.”

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