Shortly after moving to northern Brazoria County, Evan Moskowitz noticed there was something odd about Texas 288.

“I mean, it’s huge,” Moskowitz said, noting the four-lane highway’s enormous grass median and wide shoulders. “You could fit two freeways there.”

Pretty soon, there will be, a nod to explosive growth in southern Harris and northern Brazoria counties and the constant need for faster trips into key workforce centers, including the Texas Medical Center.

Crews are in the home stretch of construction of two toll lanes in each direction from Interstate 69 to the Brazoria County line — more than 10 miles of tollway along with major rebuilds of key interchanges at Loop 610 and the Sam Houston Tollway.

Yet, as the tollway being built down the center of Texas 288 races to completion, there are elements that are less certain.

Conceived at a time when tolling was leaned on by lawmakers as a way to expand roads without increasing taxes, charging drivers lately has fallen from political favor, even as thousands are willing to pay.

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Meanwhile the work lies between two eras of Houston’s recent flooding history: It was designed before heavy rains in 2015, 2016 and 2017 prompted local residents and officials to rethink flood control and storm water. It will open without any of the changes those discussions created.

That has led to worry that replacing that wide median of trees and grass with a long ribbon of concrete will worsen already well-known flooding problems along Texas 288 and many Houston neighborhoods.

The project includes massive new overpasses at key interchanges, along with new lanes. With those lanes will come new detention ponds and stormwater plans — though many question whether those will have a positive effect.

“With the geographical changes that this project has done, I don’t see any way possible it will get better,” sad Tomaro Bell, president of the MacGregor Park Super Neighborhoood Association.

First, however, crews have to finish it, something officials say remains on pace for later this year despite months of wet weather.

“We’re working along the entire 10.3 miles, so everything is coming together quickly,” said Raynese Edwards, spokesman for the Drive 288 project.

Private Project

Though the new tollway is entirely within the state’s right of way, the development agreement is structured so the private joint venture that designed and built the road receives the toll revenue to pay off the nearly $900 million building cost and future costs to maintain the toll road and highway until 2066. Blueridge Transportation Group won the job, estimated at $2.3 billion over the next half-century.

Blueridge is a consortium of worldwide construction, finance and development companies. It has six partners, but is led by the Spanish construction giant Grupo ACS, global investment firm InfraRed Capital Partners and the Israeli building and real estate company Shikun & Binui Ltd.

Such development agreements remain controversial amid fears that private companies exert too much control. Critics say the projects allow companies to reap profits, but leave the state to deal with any losses.

This legislative session in Austin, lawmakers filed a dozen bills related to reigning in or expanding comprehensive development agreements, for specific projects such as Interstate 35 in Austin, or numerous projects such as the planned managed lanes along Interstate 45 in Houston and smaller projects in the Rio Grande Valley. None has been debated in either chamber’s transportation committees.

The 288 project is the first comprehensive development agreement poised to open in the Houston region, and faced less opposition than others during development, in part because of the demand for more lanes along Texas 288.

“I don’t have a problem with tolls, you can pay them or not, as long as (officials) are doing something about the traffic,” said Brazoria County resident Paul Chen, who commutes daily into the Texas Medical Center.

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Addressing it, however, has been a major task, with at times nearly 1,000 workers spread across the project. Opinions about how well the work is proceeding, however, can be as varied as the drivers dodging every curve and bump through the work zones.

“Every week there is something different,” said Chen, 36, noting that leads to confusion for drivers who often are going too fast or not expecting a quick lane change.

Work is concentrated and most noticeable at the interchanges with the Sam Houston Tollway and Loop 610 South, as well as through south Houston neighborhoods Inside the Loop.

Ramps rise in various stages of progress, with one more summer rush to go. At Loop 610, as new ramps open, crews close the freeway to demolish the old ones. The complicated interchange also requires a complete rebuild of the freeway lanes along Texas 288, which will thread through the new confluence by curving away from the toll road, then back adjacent to it.

Loop 610 also is receiving a rebuild through the heart of the interchange. In a few weeks, that work will shift to the new portion of the freeway, opening the loop back to three lanes in each direction through the area, said Gabby Ben-Abraham, project manager for Almeda Genoa Contractors, the company created to build the project.

Traffic is less chaotic but no less bustling at the Sam Houston Tollway, where workers are building ramps to the new toll road. Soaring concrete pillars stand in the scraped earth as workers pour concrete and prepare for the next section of steel girders that will carry the road through the interchange. To accommodate nearby entrance and exit ramps, some of the sweeping overpasses travel more than a mile, curving over the Sam Houston Tollway before turning sharply for a descent to the new southbound toll road.

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Between the interchanges, where crews can confine their labors to the wide median, the effects are felt less by commuters, but significant work remains. Southern Harris County is criss-crossed by several creeks and bayous, not to mention many local streets.

“Every place there is a bridge along (Texas) 288, we have to build a bridge in the middle,” Ben-Abraham said.

That includes across Brays Bayou, which requires coordination with local and federal officials for flood control.

Provided weather does not delay efforts substantially, Edwards said the toll lanes remain on track to open later this year or in early 2020. Work starts in a few weeks on the building near Texas 288 and Holcombe that the company will use as a corporate office for the project.

Meanwhile TxDOT and company officials are sorting out whether to add sound barriers along part of the project. Neighborhood groups and local organizers, including Bell, have urged the company to add walls because they believe the wider freeway — specifically the loss of the trees in the median — has made noise filter further into nearby neighborhoods.

“It’s an issue. Maybe when they studied it they said it wasn’t an issue, but it is,” Bell said. “You have people blocks away that can now hear it that couldn’t before.”

Worried About Water

Then there are the worries about flooding. Beneath the behemoth new ramps at Loop 610 is a huge expanse of largely unseen land upon which much of the project’s public benefit is reliant. It is here, builders hope, that the flooding that has been common along the freeway finds its way, draining into what, essentially, are man-made lakes tucked into two of the four corners of the interchange. Connected by a massive pipe below the freeway, the basins are not intended to solve the flooding issues, but give nature time to work out the drainage. Box culverts connect the pipes from the freeway to Brays Bayou, on which the entire area’s drainage relies.

The basins are designed to give stormwater someplace to go when Brays is inundated. Right now, the freeway’s flow directly is tied to the bayou. In each of the past four years, at least one heavy rain has led to severe flooding at the freeway.

Edwards said officials are optimistic the work will improve matters, but are not claiming they have solved widespread, often community-wide flaws in flooding management and policy.

“We’ve just updated that which needed some updating, which should help,” Edwards said, noting the project meets Texas’ requirement for drainage based on 100-year storms, and designs do not account for what development around the new freeway will do to the watershed. Nothing will help on those occasions when Mother Nature dumps five or six inches of rain in an hour, he added.

Residents remain less optimistic. Some have a hard time believing big ditches can accommodate for miles of lost grass and dirt, or that builders have considered the rainfall consequences for the entire area.

“What we didn’t want was the removal of all that permeable ground,” Bell said.

Now, flooding on the freeway is just one concern, she added. In past rains, residents grew to appreciate that the freeway flooding meant that water was not coming into their neighborhood. Now they wonder where it will go with the tollway in place.

“(Texas) 288 is our detention pond,” Bell said. “I don’t want someone to change that because someone gave them $1.50.”

dug.begley@chron.com

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