Starr County’s Loop 195 Will Bleed a Small-Town Dry

Starr County has spent the last decade clawing its way toward stability and growth, and that makes what is happening with State Loop 195 around Roma even more infuriating. Starr is finally seeing rising GDP, higher property values, and new public investment, while Roma is being positioned as collateral damage in someone else’s version of “progress.”

Over roughly the last decade, Starr County has seen measurable economic growth, even if it still lags the state overall. County GDP has climbed in real terms since the late 2010s, reflecting more economic activity moving through this historically underinvested border community. Median household income has also inched upward, reaching just over the high‑30,000s by 2023, in a county where every small gain matters.

At the county level, public finances show a government slowly strengthening its footing. Net position has increased, revenues have grown, and capital assets—from roads and buildings to equipment—have expanded, signaling years of steady investment in infrastructure and basic services. Property tax revenues jumped by nearly a fifth between recent fiscal years, driven by rising appraisals and new development, with appraised values for budgeting up by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Highway planners like to talk about “relief routes,” but for a town like Roma, a relief route looks a lot like a heart bypass. In medicine, a bypass literally reroutes blood around a blocked artery to keep the heart alive. On a map, a highway bypass reroutes traffic—the lifeblood of small businesses—around a community instead of through it. The patient that gets saved is the regional traffic flow; the organ that gets starved can be the town itself.

For years, Loop 195 has been a moving incision line. Early designs in the late 2000s envisioned a loop that would curve around both Rio Grande City and Roma, acknowledging both communities as part of the body. Over time, alignments shifted, and starting points crept, until the practical outcome became clear: the “circulation” that matters to retailers, gas stations, and small restaurants is increasingly designed to flow past Roma’s veins, not through them. When you cut circulation to part of a body, you already know what happens.

Roma’s leadership had decades to see this coming. These plans have not been a secret, and right‑of‑way talk has been happening since the 2000s. In all that time, those with power and information had every opportunity to position themselves, to buy land along the proposed corridors, and to imagine new subdivisions or commercial strips near the future loop. That quiet land‑banking stands in stark contrast to the public silence about what a bypass would mean for the existing city grid and its people.

So, Roma is being gently, almost politely, put out to pasture. Leaders—whether blinded by empty promises, dazzled by the idea of shiny new development, or guided by their own private interests—are steering the town toward a future where they, personally, will likely have options: sell, relocate, build somewhere else along the loop. The average taxpayer will not be so flexible. As valuations climb and public debt and infrastructure obligations grow, residents and small homeowners will be the ones absorbing higher property tax burdens and cost of living, even as the spontaneous cash flow from pass‑through traffic evaporates.

This pattern is not unique to Roma; it is almost textbook. Studies of highway bypasses in small and rural communities show that towns under a few thousand residents are especially vulnerable when a new route diverts traffic away. Travel‑related businesses—gas stations, diners, motels, mom‑and‑pop convenience stores—often see double‑digit declines in sales once the bulk of drivers are rerouted.

Texas-focused research found that after relief routes opened, gas station sales in small cities dropped around 15%, while eating and drinking establishments lost roughly 10–15% of their business on average. In some small towns, downtown traffic never recovered, leaving shuttered storefronts where a modest but steady main‑street economy used to exist. For communities already living on thin margins, that is not an inconvenience; it is a slow economic amputation.

Progress for whom?

All of this brings the core question into sharp focus: progress for whom? Starr County’s numbers will likely continue to show economic gains—higher GDP, stronger tax base, more capital projects in the ground. On paper, that looks like success. But if the loop quietly drains Roma’s circulation, that “progress” will be built on the hollowing out of a small border city that has already carried its share of state and federal experiments.

Leaders have spent years positioning themselves so that when reality hits, it hits taxpayers like a blow to the face—through rising appraisals, squeezed small businesses, and fewer chances for local families to build wealth where they live. They had decades to align land purchases, to imagine a new community by the loop, to plan for their own exit if Roma’s current core falters. Ordinary residents had none of that.

A heart bypass can save a life, but it always carries risk, and the patient gets a say—consent, explanation, transparency. Roma is being scheduled for a highway bypass without anything close to that level of honesty. When the dust settles and the ribbon is cut, the map might be cleaner and the drive faster. But unless the people most at risk are centered in the decisions—not just the landowners along the loop—Starr County will have to admit what this really was: not relief, but sacrifice.

@Janie

@alvarezjanie

Copyright © 2025 Janie Alvarez for FRONTeras.