Commissioners considering uniform speed limit for county roads

Gonzales County commissioners will hold a public hearing at 9 a.m. Monday, June 26, to hear comments about establishing a uniform speed limit of 35 miles per hour on most county-maintained public roads.

This comes after commissioners voted unanimously to advertise the hearing in the Gonzales Inquirer at their Monday, June 12 meeting.

The measure that would be discussed at the public hearing would also establish a speed limit of 20 miles per hour on roads which traverse “urban districts.” However, there are very few roads within Gonzales County which meet that definition.

An urban district, per section 541.102 of the Texas Transportation code, is territory “adjacent to and including a highway if the territory is not in a municipality and is improved with structures that are used for business, industry, or dwelling houses and located at intervals of less than 100 feet for a distance of at least one-quarter mile on either side of the highway.”

“The only thing I can think of (as urban) just off the top of my head is the Kelley Loop (outside Gonzales),” County Judge Pat Davis said. “That way you can get it done through the Transportation Code, but on any other kind of road you can't go below 30 miles per hour unless you have a TxDOT traffic survey.”

“We really don’t have anything that pertains to this,” Precinct 3 Commissioner Kevin La Fleur said.

“The majority of roads that we will be dealing with would be (set at) 35,” Davis said. “You can go as low as 30 without needing a traffic survey so 35 would be well within what you can do.”

“Going 35 is still pretty fast on a gravel road,” Precinct 2 Commissioner Donnie Brzozowski said. “It really is.”

Carly Russell, the secretary for Road and Bridge precincts 1, 2 and 3, said approval was not needed necessarily to advertise the public hearing, but “I think it was good because people are going to hear about it and they can know that it's coming up and then when you have a hearing they will have more knowledge of it.”

Davis said the county needs to take action because there is a lack of uniformity that can lead not only to confusion, but would allow people to go faster than what is safe on the roadways.
“Without a 35 mile per hour sign out there, state law says the speed limit (on a county road) is 60,” Davis said. “But once this is passed, it can actually be enforced. There are some that you have passed already that are actually legit. This would handle all of them.”

Commissioners asked Davis if they established a speed limit of 35, would it be possible to lower it to 30 after the public hearing. The court would have to adopt the speed limit advertised at that time or reject it, but could come back at a later date with specific changes, Davis said.

“If you put it across the board at 35, you can still come back at another commissioners court for a specific road and say, ‘I want to lower that to 30.’” Davis said. 

“If we put it at 30, people would be complaining it’s too slow, so if we give them 35, that’s plenty of speed,” Brzozowski said. “If they are going over 35, they are going to run over somebody.”

“We can do 35 unless you have some places where they have curves that are bad and then we can come back and lower it later,” Davis said.

Russell said Allison Bass & Associates, the law firm which advises most of the state’s 254 counties, has told her that changes can be made afterwards for specific roads and the court “could always come back and do as many specific roads as you want.”

In other action, commissioners voted to allow fireworks sales for the Fourth of July holiday without restricting any specific fireworks at this time. Members of the court expressed hope that people will exercise caution so as to avoid causing any grass fires.