To the Editor:
After nearly two years of delays, the Salado city limit signs are finally up. The south approach sign is nearing completion, and with some minor tweaks will be ready to tum on.
The contribution I made is not directly seen. I wired the sign. we planned to have each lamp on the sculpture turn off and on independently, and the color bars behind the glass bricks would change color. Then TXDOT said, “No blinking lights, no color changing.” So I had to strip out all the wiring in the sculpture, and start over.
There are approximately 130 lamps in the sculpture, with eight hand soldered connections for each lamp. That’s over 1000 hand soldered connections. Each connection had to have heat shrink tubing over it in order to weatherproof it. All of that went into the bucket, and had to be redone. Oh well, l have to put up with Congress, and I have to endure local politics, so why should I be surprised that TXDOT would say, “Oh, by the way, you can’t do that.”
I wasn’t the only one. Melissa Paxton and Oscar Salinas had to hand fit the lamps into the hand blown globes and seal them.
They had to pull them all out and reseal them after I rewired them. We should call ourselves the Redeaux Team.
Now about the color bars. I found a neat color control with over 16 million color combinations, 37 pre-programmed sequences, and 255 intensity levels. But no, we can’t change colors. So they said, “Make it teal.” What is teal, anyway? Fortunately for me, there was a group of 15 of Salado’s artists touring Glass River Design at that moment, so I asked for their help. I adjusted the controls until they all agreed that the color was teal. I wrote the settings down, a_nd we set the color once the sign was up. I have it on the word of Salado’s finest that the color is teal. Looks green to me.
I think someone with more political clout than I have should take up this color changing issue with TXDOT. The city limit signs of Stafford, Texas, change color. If they can do it, why can’t we do it?
Now that the sign is almost finished, I find that I am in the area that is part of the deannexation vote. I am not happy about this. Not a lot of us were consulted about this. I do not want to be separated from Salado, just because a few misinformed individuals think they can skip out of paying taxes. If we get deannexed, may their neighbors raise pigs.
Sincerely,
Mark H. Rice
Salado
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