Tag: Vista Ridge

In far north Tarrant County, there’s a road so new it’s not even on navigation apps yet. But Shelton Ranch Road is the relief the Vista Ranch neighborhood has been asking for since 2015.

Because of a major rail yard less than a mile from the cluster of houses along Tinsley Lane, residents frequently get trapped by the trains traversing the only entrance to their neighborhood in unincorporated Tarrant County west of Haslet.

Clint Magee, a resident of Vista Ranch since the neighborhood opened in 2005, said the trains could halt traffic for 30 minutes up to eight hours.

“That really opened our eyes to the potential for a medical emergency to be realized,” Magee said. “You can’t come back from that.”

When Precinct 4 Commissioner Manny Ramirez, a Fort Worth Republican, was voted into office in 2022, one of the first things he did was parse through the files of complaints. Tinsley Lane’s was an inch thick, he said.

Up until that point, there was only a “back-of-the-napkin contingency plan” if emergency responders ever needed to get into the neighborhood. Firefighters, police and ambulance crews would have had to use an old oil and gas path that — no one had a key to — if the need ever arose.

“Knock on wood, we had never really had any known significant medical events due to the train,” Magee said. “But it’s not an if. It’s a when this is truly going to happen. As the community grew and the residents got a little older, and the health issues became more apparent, you had to have an opportunity to get those folks the care they needed if they did need it.”

Once Ramirez read the thick file of complaints, he got a contingency plan in place and began to work on the permanent solution.

After two and a half years, Shelton Ranch Road became the reality residents had begged decades for. On Thursday morning, the commissioner and his director of field operations Doug Deweese cut the ribbon to officially open the freshly paved road. The 1.2 mile track runs north to south connecting Tinsley Lane to Peden Road.

Deweese said the road crew busted their tails to have it completed within seven months of the final approvals being secured. That’s “lightning fast” in road work, one Precinct 4 staff member said.

The neighbors who attended the ribbon cutting ceremony were thrilled to see the road opened Thursday morning. For Deweese and his stalwart crew, that meant a lot.

“Road builders never get thanked,” Deweese said. “Because if you have a road, and it has a pothole or something in it, people are always griping and complaining about the pothole. But when you go out to fix it, they don’t understand. You don’t just go out and throw some dirt in it. You have to grind it up and rebuild … But the people that came by here were happy, so it was a good morale boost for the employees to hear something positive.”

Deweese said the road crew were happy to trade ruthlessly aggressive drivers for the wild hogs, coyotes and deer they’d come across in the quiet of Vista Ranch.

Though it rarely gets recognized, Ramirez said the most important thing a commissioner can do is improve mobility, because that’s what is important to the folks who live in Tarrant County.

“We’re working on our roads and bridges every single day,” Ramirez said. “It’s a critical piece of what we do, and probably, again, it’s what touches the lives of the residents most. And I’m just proud to be able to be a part of it.”

Ramirez said though the road is only two lanes now, there are plans to expand it for more developments coming down the pipeline.