Denton has a budget surplus of $192,000, and some city council members suggest allocating it to the Bicycle Plan. Public hearing on Sept 6, vote on Sept 20.
Council member Dalton Gregory advocated using the money to help implement the city’s ongoing bicycle plan, which would receive only $50,000 under the proposed budget.
“I completely agree with Chris that we need to not spend money that’s not there,” Gregory said during the meeting. “But on the other hand, we’ve invested some money on this plan. We’ve actually been talking about bike and pedestrian needs for over 30 years and not really invested a lot. … If we’re really serious about this, we’ve got to do more than plan.”
As councilman Gregory points out, discussions of bicycle accommodation stretches back decades in Denton’s history, but there were never any long strides. The fragments of those discussions are what we have now: the UNT Language Building bike “parking mall”, failed plans to paint lanes on Fry and Welch, previous P&Z discussions of bike lanes here and here, and the short (yet popular) W. Hickory bike lane.
Here’s some context on the $192,000:
- one four-way traffic signal intersection costs $225,000+
- $192K is only 3.3% of the target $5.8M street maintenance budget
- $192K is .032% of Denton’s overall $585M city budget
- cost of Hickory and Industrial restriping to add ~10 parking spots: $60,000