County Commissioners oppose elimination of county wide polling places; hear update on transportation plan

Victoria County Commissioners approved an ordinance opposing the elimination of the countywide polling place program.

 The program allows any registered voter within the county to vote at any polling location in the county during an election, County Judge Ben Zeller said. 

“The program opens up a lot of opportunity and convenience to voters within a given county,” Zeller said. “Victoria County was one of the first counties in the state to implement countywide voting and our residents have loved the convenience of it.”

Victoria County Elections Administrator Maargetta Hill said the countywide polling place program is very important for the county to have.

“There is a bill in the Texas House trying to eliminate countywide polling places and as election officials, we think that is definitely devastating to us,” she said. “We've been countywide for these 14 years, and we would like to let our legislators know how important it is for us to keep it.”

 Additionally, the Victoria County Commissioners Court received an update from the Victoria Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) regarding the 2050 Metropolitan Transportation Plan (MTP) on Monday during the court’s regular meeting. 

The MTP is a federally required long-range transportation plan that takes into account all modes of public transportation. The process of implementing the MTP takes into account public feedback on proposed projects as well as how the Metropolitan Planning Organization analyzes proposed projects and assesses fiscal constraints, a representative for the MPO said. 

“Ultimately, that comes to a fiscally constrained program of projects, which is not a statement of obligated funding to those projects, but looking out over 25 years, it's a statement of reasonable expectation of funding for the proposed projects.”

When the MPO is developing the plan it looks at data sets from roadway safety, pavement and bridge conditions and transportation system performance. Additionally, the MPO looks at the county’s transportation performance in comparison to statewide targets, the representative said. 

“We look at the performance of our county in comparison to statewide targets,” he said. “By and large, the investments the county has made in the transportation system have visibly improved the safety of the roadways, and we can see that in comparison to statewide targets, we have lower crash rates and lower fatality rates than our statewide averages.”

Part of the reason the county has lower crash and fatality rates is due to the median on Navarro and an action plan completed by the MPO. 

“The MPO recently completed a safe streets for all action plan, and a lot of that was outreach and education on how to use the system more safely, as well as identifying low cost, high impact improvements to improve the system for all modes of transportation,” 

Another component of the MTP is transit asset management, which enables the MPO to look at the state of the public transit vehicles. The Victoria transit vehicles are on track with statewide targets regarding their useful life benchmark. 

A lot of the projects in the proposed MTP are very low-cost and yield a high impact. This includes improving street lights and intersections that enable law enforcement and first responders to have more reliance on the transportation system when responding to calls.