A costly mistake last year turns into a new road project for the Texas Department of Transportation and now we may be seeing deja vu along Montana Avenue.

The stretch of Montana Avenue between Lee Trevino Drive and Loop 375 now is open to two lanes of traffic but a project has been finalized to bring back an additional lane that the Texas Department of Transportation was forced to remove last spring.

While making improvements along Montana Avenue last January, TxDOT restriped this area, making the shoulder a third lane.

A couple months afterward, TxDOT was forced to reverse this action by the Federal Highway Commission because it didn't file the correct paperwork and failed to meet the necessary regulations.

State representative Joe Pickett tells KFOX14 all road projects have to be reviewed by the Metropolitan Planning Organization to ensure they meet federal and environmental regulations.

After reviewing what happened along Montana, Pickett said the MPO found the extra lane helped traffic in the area so

TxDOT went back to the drawing board and came back with a plan

"Any of the major projects in our region that you're adding new lanes to all have to be modeled they all go into one big plan we review. So this one is in there now and we have the money to design it and to do the environmental study on it. We have to do a little more than we were originally going to do because of the growth especially on the south side of Montana," said Pickett.

The Montana project could start next summer and isn't the only roadway that will get an extra lane.

"We've got plenty of orange barrels and barricades to go up for the next two, three and four years," said Pickett.

El Paso hasn't been affected by the federal cuts to transportation and the city has found ways to secure funding for future projects that are needed to keep up with traffic.

"People think because we're on Interstate 10 and it goes from California to Florida that we have all this traffic going through here that causes problem but it's not. At the New Mexico State line and on the eastside Hudspeth County line there's about 80,000 vehicles a day. Along Bassett center there's 241,000 vehicles a day, so that's us and we need to take care of the inner city congestion," he said.

MPO is reviewing major projects in the works to do just that.

Those projects include adding a lane on to the Loop 375 southbound from Montana Avenue to Bob Hope Drive, extending on and off ramps along the newly constructed SPUR 601 and adding more connector ramps to the not yet completed east side spaghetti bowl.

"The new spaghetti bowl that everyone's talking about on the eastside we're going to open the three ramps and in January, and hopefully start constructing the other ones in February or March of next year," said Pickett.

The plans to add an additional lane on Loop 375 are not extensive because Pickett said it's already constructed.

"We made room for the third lane but like Montana we have to model it and show the Federal Highway Commission that it's not going to add to our poor air quality. We hope to have that restriped probably by the spring of next year," he said.

Improvements on the SPUR 601 are also expected to start sometime next year.

What do all these traffic projects say about El Paso?

"Well it's a good thing. We're doing some things that other parts of the state frankly aren't doing. We've created things called Transportation Reinvestment Zones where we're using some of the growth that's showed up on commercial development to help fund projects. There's just not enough state dollars so we're putting in some of our own local money to leverage that," he replied.