By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
County officials have announced they will shelve a plan to build sunshades for aircraft at Laughlin Air Force Base, saying the amount of the grant for the project falls far short of the construction costs.
Val Verde County Commissioners Court members during their June 20 regular term meeting voted to send a letter to state officials who provided the grant, notifying them of their decision not to move forward with the sunshades project.
County Judge Lewis G. Owens Jr. said the county will re-apply for additional funds to take up the project at some later date.
County Engineer Carlos Velarde spoke to the court during the June 20 meeting about the project.
Velarde said he met several weeks ago about the project with Laughlin officials, Owens, County Commissioner Pct. 3 Beau Nettleton and Shannalea Taylor, a representative of the Texas Military Preparedness Commission.
“Up through December 2022, we’ve completed a geotechnical site survey, all the plans have been approved by Laughlin and the FAA. We’ve spent on this project a total of $313,192, and we’ve received $223,247 for reimbursement number one, and we’re pending a second reimbursement of $89,944,” Velarde told the court.
“We have five different options to build (the sunshades), but unfortunately we cannot do it with the funds that we have, so we need to send out letters that we cannot complete this project,” Velarde said.
Owens added, “The bottom line is, we’ve tried every which way, with the base, the county, engineers, you name it, they’ve looked at it, different ways to be able to fund this, and it’s just not possible at this point, so we’ll be sending a letter that we won’t be requesting the funds that are left in this grant.
“It looks at this point that the county won’t be out any money because we’ve been reimbursed everything that we’ve done, but (for the future) we will have a set of plans that we can move forward with to do both sunshades instead of just one and request funds from the state to do that,” Owens added.
Velarde showed the court the grantor for the sunshades project was the state’s Defense Economic Adjustment Assistance Grant, available through the office of the governor. The total amount of the grant for the project was $1,576,433, with the term of the grant spanning from February 2020 through August 2023.
Velarde said construction estimates reviewed in December 2022 included an estimated price tag of $3,556,357 to build to two sunshade sheds, $1,979,923 over the grant amount; $2,207,838 to build one sunshade shed, $632,404 over the grant amount; and $1,653,047 to build one sunshade shed with no infrastructure, $76,613 over the grant amount.
“At the end of the day, we will be sending a letter to the state that we will not be moving forward with this grant, but because we were able to go through the process of coming up with the plans for the project in the future, we will be applying for this grant again,” Owens told the court.
Nettleton then made a motion to authorize Owens to send the letter. County Commissioner Pct. 4 Gustavo “Gus” Flores gave the second, and the court approved the motion unanimously.
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