Legacy in a Community

It's interesting to think about what you'll be remembered for after you've gone on... What will people say about me when I've shuffled off this mortal coil? What will be my legacy?

This was recently in the paper:
MB’s Eagle Drive nearing completion

Posted: Sunday, September 15, 2013 12:00 am
By Mark Fleming mark.fleming@baytownsun.com

All of the traffic lanes are open on Eagle Drive in Mont Belvieu, and the final touches should be finished by the end of October, a couple of months ahead of schedule, City Administrator Bryan Easum said.

Construction work by Angel Brothers should be finished within two or three weeks, Easum said, and landscaping work soon after. When all of the work is finished, he said, the estimated cost is $15.4 million for the road and related drainage work and $523,000 for landscaping – about a half million dollars under budget.

Eagle Drive is home to many of Mont Belvieu’s businesses, as well as all Barbers Hill ISD schools, city and county offices, the city park and many homes and apartments.

The construction effort replaced about 2.5 miles of a street that had two lanes, a turning lane and ditches with a four-lane boulevard with a landscaped median and sidewalks on both sides. The median will have 195 trees when landscaping is complete. New street lighting is in place and will be working soon. On the west side, Eagle Drive has a standard 4-foot sidewalk, Easum said. The east side has a 10-foot wide sidewalk. “If you come out here in the evenings at 6 or 7 o’clock, you’ll see a lot of people riding bikes and jogging and walking up and down the new sidewalk.”

While the first thing motorists are likely to notice is that the street is more attractive than the one it replaced, Easum said the need for replacement was practical. Projections are that Eagle Drive will one day carry as much traffic as Baytown’s Garth Road. A road with a median, as the new Eagle Drive has, can carry more traffic than an undivided roadway, and is about 40 percent safer, he said.

When reminded that former city planner Bill Cobabe had said Mont Belvieu built the new Eagle Drive to avoid having “another Garth Road,” Easum chuckled and said only, “We don’t want to have the clutter that’s sometimes seen on area roads.”

Before the construction began, he said, the city also enacted ordinances controlling the appearance of businesses along the road, and require new businesses to have parking lots that connect to neighboring businesses – a feature that reduces the number of times cars enter traffic lanes. The new street is already making a difference,

Easum said. “I think it’s already totally changed the appearance. When we have business prospects and stuff come out, we’ve had several comment how much it’s changed and how good it looks over the old three-lane road with ditches,” he said.

Another project that is changing the appearance of Eagle Drive for the better, Easum said, is the addition of nearly 400 trees to the city park. The trees were much cheaper than the ones on Eagle Drive, as the vendor wanted to dispose of them since they weren’t quite up to the appearance standards expected by landscape architects.

“They were 9- or 10-year-old trees, so it really gave us a head start on trees out there,” Easum said. “We paid about a third of the price for those trees that we paid for the trees on Eagle Drive,” he said. “These look very natural in a park setting.”

Easum said some of the new trees have died after transplanting, but the vendor is replacing them.

(Back to me)

I'm not entirely sure how to take that - that that's all I'm remembered for is not wanting Eagle Drive to look like Garth Road. Not that I think that's a bad thing. It was nice that Bryan pointed out that we also enacted ordinances regarding signage, architectural standards, and parking that will help with the appearance of the community as well.

In a very real sense, a community is a dynamic thing, and one person's influence is never as great as that person would hope. I ran into Mike Pomykal from the City Council the other day at the post office, and he said that I'd had an impact on the community - that I'd made a difference. That made me feel really good. Because you know what? Every little bit helps. And I was part of something in Mont Belvieu that I am very proud of.