By BRAD ROLLINS
Managing Editor

At a town hall meeting a few weeks ago, the floor was opened for any citizen to discuss any topic. All anyone wanted to talk about was McCarty Lane.

“We have 2,000 kids out there every day driving on that cow path. The reality is that that road is not fit for farm equipment,” former city council member Ron Hart said. “When some group of teenagers gets killed out on that cow path on their way to school, there’s going to be plenty of blame to go around.”

When the city council takes up the issue at their meeting tonight, it’s hard for even the most attentive observers to remember all the details of how a narrow, pockmarked two-lane road — hugged by barbed wire fences much of the way — became a primary approach to the $60-million plus high school that opened last year.

The road tracks the planned route for the first three-mile segment of an eastern loop around San Marcos, Farm-to-Market Road 110. The project was part of a $152.8 million package of road improvements caught in limbo with a nearly total turnover of the county’s commissioners court in 2006 followed by the rejection by county voters last May of a bond package to fund the program.

Now city leaders are looking at widening the road as a stop-gap until the state road package is finalized, finally. In the meantime, Hart said, “it’s just an accident waiting to happen. Mark my words: It’s going to happen.”

RELATED IN THE MERCURY:

• County asks voters to ok $207 million road package | August 27, 2008
• City, county hammer out deal to widen McCarty | April 29, 2008
• Kyle council stalls Dacy Lane project | April 9, 2008
• With needs piling up, council looks at ways to square ‘wish list’ with reality | January 30, 2008
• San Marcos loop work on the road again | April 21, 2009