SAN ANTONIO – The City of San Antonio is hosting a community meeting next week to discuss the proposed Bandera Road Corridor draft plan.
Nancy Schwartz lives off of Bandera Road. She said she doesn’t like what she’s seeing on the proposed plan for the Bandera Road Corridor.
“They are saying it will alleviate the traffic. I don’t think it will,” she said.
Schwartz is one of many residents in the area who are closely studying the draft and the plan by the Texas Department of Transportation and the City of San Antonio.
The plan includes possible solutions to ease congestion, but some solutions might impact residential neighborhoods more than others.
“What I’m concerned about too is they’re going to pit neighbor against neighbor, and that’s not a good thing,” Schwartz said.
Area residents met Thursday night at St. Brigid Catholic Church to speak out against the parts of the proposed draft that would create new roads or extend roads at the cost of neighborhoods.
Rudy Nino Jr., with COSA’s Planning Department, said there are a lot of components to the plan that would create better mobility for those on the highway and sidewalks along Bandera Road.
The vision is to make the road into a parkway, but right now, he said everything is just a draft. The whole plan is 133 pages.
“Details about concepts that are in the plan will ultimately be removed, because if there isn’t support within the community for a particular element of a plan, then we don’t want to move forward with that,” Nino said. “There’s a lot of good work in this plan, and there’s an element in there that may be difficult or infeasible or may require further study, and it’s just not timely. We can remove it so that we can stay focused on ultimately what the key issues are along Bandera Road.”
As of late Thursday night, several meetings between HOA leaders and District 7 staff resulted in the temporary removal of some aspects of the draft plan that community members did not want to see.
Councilwoman Ana Sandoval said, “The Bandera Road Corridor plan has been a years-long collaborative effort. A critical component for me has always been public participation, so I’m glad to hear the community’s feedback, and look forward to incorporating community input into the plan.”
The city meeting will be August 24, 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., at City Church on Bandera Road.