State filing puts I-35 rebuild through Valley View at about $302 million

Drivers on Interstate 35 through Valley View face roughly five years of construction under a Texas Department of Transportation plan registered this month at about $302 million. The Sept. 16 filing with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation covers the Cooke County stretch from FM 3002 to Spring Creek Road, and the registered scope is a full rebuild: main lanes, frontage roads, ramps and cross streets.

The registration lists a March 2027 start and a February 2032 finish. Those are filed plan dates rather than evidence of work underway, and they sit at odds with TxDOT's corridor overview, which still anticipates a 2026 start for the southern Valley View phase.

The TDLR filing identifies TxDOT's Wichita Falls District as owner, Kyle Poirot, P.E., as the owner's contact and Consor Engineers LLC, listed at a Fort Worth address, as designer.

Valley View sits at the south end of a 22-mile program TxDOT carries north to mile marker 1 in Oklahoma. The agency's corridor overview describes an interim design adding a lane in each direction and an ultimate design adding two, and says the northern phase, running from about half a mile south of US 82 to that Oklahoma end point, began construction in the summer of 2024.

The paperwork reaches back a decade. TxDOT held public meetings in 2015 and 2017, dropped a proposed BNSF railroad realignment in late 2019 and presented a revised design in February 2020 that leaves the tracks where they sit. Federal environmental clearance followed that December.

Corridor traffic in the 2020 federal environmental record: about 56,300 vehicles a day in the 2015 baseline, projected near 92,350 by 2045, with trucks about a fifth of peak-hour traffic.

Four records carry a dollar amount for the segment, each on a different basis.

| Record | Basis | Figure |

| --- | --- | --- |

| TxDOT rural transportation presentation, May 2024 | Project estimate, FY2026 letting | $195 million |

| 2025–2028 STIP revision, Sept. 2024 | Construction cost / total project cost | About $222 million / $281.3 million |

| Draft 2026 Unified Transportation Program | Draft planning figure | $361.2 million |

| TDLR registration, Sept. 16, 2026 | Registered construction estimate | $301.9 million |

The draft program figure is a planning number, separate in basis from the construction estimate filed with TDLR. The 2024 statewide revision's funding table showed federal and state dollars covering the work, with no local match.

The 2020 corridor fact sheet tells landowners what TxDOT anticipated: about 124 acres of added right-of-way across 163 parcels and possible displacement of six commercial structures, figures that cover the whole corridor rather than the registered segment alone. That design would also replace discontinuous two-way frontage roads with continuous one-way roads, with crossovers about every mile and a half.

Closer to home, Gainesville announced Sept. 13 that contractors would pull old railroad tracks out of North Dixon Street near the 1200 block, between Tony's Feed & Seed and Red River Co-op, and replace the roadway with concrete. The city set the work for Sept. 14 through 21, weather permitting, with crews rebuilding half the street at a time and letting the concrete cure before switching sides to keep the road and the businesses open.