Wirtz Dam Bridge: Engineering Is 95 Percent Done, Land Buying Is Next, and an Ancient Find Has Pushed Construction to Fall 2029

The Highland Lakes' long bridge is in its land phase. Burnet County Judge Bryan Wilson told the Marble Falls Messenger that engineering for the Wirtz Dam Road bridge is about 95 percent complete, the surveys are finished, and offers are being finalized through the county's acquisition company, with about $3 million set aside for land acquisition. Area mayors - Cottonwood Shores, Meadowlakes, Marble Falls and Horseshoe Bay - recently toured the dam for a bird's-eye view of the site, where the planned bridge crosses an existing submerged water crossing.

The money map is mostly federal and state. The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization funded the engineering through federal transportation funding - about $3 million to KC Engineering, with TxDOT reimbursing close to $2.5 million of the county's engineering cost - and another $10 million in federal appropriation, credited to Congressman John Carter's office, is aimed mainly at utility relocation: Pedernales Electric Cooperative transmission lines move into right-of-way the county buys, while TxDOT handles the rest of the land acquisition and utility work, including Cottonwood Shores' water lines, LCRA transmission lines and phone fiber. Cottonwood Shores itself must relocate water and wastewater mains on Wirtz Dam Road, with its costs reimbursed by the county. Per the county's March 2025 project report, TxDOT and the Federal Highway Administration carry 100 percent of the estimated $35 million construction cost, in a total project priced at about $47.44 million including engineering and roughly $8 million of state funding.

The delay is the past itself. Earlier this year, crews found an archaeological site on the project's north shore - suspected charred remains of primitive tools or possible cooking vessels - and construction that had been planned to start at the end of this year is now set for fall 2029, with completion potentially by the end of 2031. The crossing, in development since the early 1990s to improve east-west mobility across the Highland Lakes, runs along Wirtz Dam Road between RM 1431, near Granite Shoals and west of Marble Falls, and RM 2147 West in Cottonwood Shores, beside Horseshoe Bay; earlier plans described a span of about 1,750 feet, with two 12-foot travel lanes and 10-foot shoulders.

Wilson frames the stakes in minutes, not miles. 'It's also about EMS response. It's a public safety project,' he told the Messenger. 'It's life and death for thousands of people who live in that corner over there, who can't get to a hospital in a reasonable amount of time.' For the corner of Burnet County west of the lakes, that wait now runs to a 2029 construction start - with the design work, at last, nearly finished.