Lobbying the Mayor – Iram M, Elianah G, and George R

This project is to show that teens have a voice in the community. Most teens our age are unaware of the political complications happening in our society. Therefore, we picked this project because we feel that the city needs to repair a local road called FM544. Many accidents have been caused by the potholes, and the road decay, along with the narrowness of the rode.  Previously being a truck route, FM544 is dangerous due to the abundance of trucks traveling to and from the rock quarry. For example of how dangerous it possibly could be, one of our partners was actually in an accident due to the extensive time the truck took to pull out of the rock quarry; she was rear-ended by a woman turning the corner at 50 miles per hour.

With this project we believe that by achieving the city’s cooperation in repairing the road with us, we can improve our communities’ safety and show other teens that we have a voice.

For our plan we knew we would need some way to get the community to participate so we created petitions explaining our goal to get FM544 fixed. We thought that once anyone read the petition it would cause a chain reaction. That person would tell someone that they know that a group of kids are doing a project to fix the back road everyone dreads to drive on. There is no one in our community who does not know about the back road and how terrible the pot holes are. Our goal for this project is to get our voices heard. With the fifteen petitions we set out along with the video we made and uploaded onto youtube, people will see it and see that teenagers are taking action and trying to make a difference within the community. FM 544 consists of all the pot holes and uneven grounds along with the dangerous entries, exits, and turns.  All the cars and trucks that drive on it are put in danger taking into account the speed of the cars and bumpy ground. This road has not only caused severe car crashes that total vehicles, but also fatal crashes that lead to death. More houses are being built around the road, and more and more people are driving on it. The quick patch ups of the pot holes are becoming very ineffective with consequences of tire damage, alignment damage, engine damage and much more. We want this road to be a safe place to drive. We hope to reach this goal by showing the city evidence of how much we care about this topic and how the many people that drive on the road also care about it too. We will give them evidence of the pot holes we talk about by showing them a video taken by the group on a ride down FM544, also by all the signatures on the fifteen petitions we set up around the community. We will try to persuade them and make our voices heard as well as we can.