The City of San Angelo will have a hearing of the Planning Board on Sept 9 to decide whether or not to close Avenue D through Fort Concho at the request of the fort’s Director.

Those of us who live in the neighborhood and whose children attend Fort Concho Elementary need your help to keep it open.

****Please email your desire to keep this road open to Shelley.paschal@cosatx.us or plan to attend the hearing at 1:30 pm on Sept 9. ****

During a neighborhood meeting at Fort Concho Elementary, the fort’s Director states that he wanted to close the road to make it safer for visitors to the fort and to maintain historical accuracy.

However, there has been one public safety call to that stretch of road in the past 20 years, and it was for a medical reason.

When the people at the meeting asked for a traffic study and water drainage study since there were concerns that closing off the road would slow emergency service response times to the neighborhood and make ingress and egress to the neighborhood due to flooding on the other roads, we were told that these would be conducted and another meeting would be held to discuss these.

The traffic study was conducted and the results showed that the road is fairly busy but that there are no safety issues traffic wise as a majority of people travel the speed limit. A drainage study is at least 10 years away per the Stormwater Reclamation department.

Instead of having another neighborhood meeting, the fort’s Director went to the planning commission and asked to have the city abandon the road, thereby bypassing those who live in the neighborhood. The sign announcing this was not displayed prominently and is currently up against a fence post on the fort grounds and not posted in such a way to be easily seen from Avenue D or Oakes Street.

More than 40 cars per day use this stretch of the street to pick up students from Fort Concho Elementary as there is no other parking to walk up and pick up your child without walking 1 1/2 to 2 blocks.

Please take a couple of minutes from your day and let the City know we want to keep this road open.

*written by Tara Haidinger**