A Texas teenager helped his border community win a $13 million grant to improve the environment

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ODESSA — When he was 13, Ramon Rodriguez stood before the Presidio City Council. He had a vision for his hometown, a hot, arid border community.

He wanted the council to create a department dedicated to preserving the environment. The department would install composting bins around town, and build greenhouses and tree nurseries that collect water. Part of the town would be dedicated green spaces where building would be prohibited.

The council, with its shoestring budget, did not adopt his suggestions.

That decision in 2018 did not deter Rodriguez, who has looked for ways to put his plan in place piecemeal. Then, late last year, Rodriguez learned the region won a $13 million federal grant he helped write.

“We need this, we should have this,” he said. “And now it's becoming a reality. It's such a beautiful moment.”

The grant is part of the Infrastructure Reduction Act that President Joe Biden signed in 2022. The law included $2 billion for nationwide environmental and climate justice projects. Texas received about $53 million from the program, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Houston’s Health department received $20 million, in part to reduce pollution. Air Alliance Houston, an environmental advocacy group, won $2.9 million to bolster a program that tracks industrial permits submitted to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Meanwhile, Waco and other nonprofits got $17.9 million to address pollution and climate change, install charging stations for electric vehicles and establish university programs.

The Big Bend Conservation Alliance, a regional group overseeing projects across three counties, will administer the money and spend it on infrastructure to help with heat waves and create green areas.

They will build dedicated green spaces along bike lanes and pedestrian streets, thousands of native trees for residents, a community garden, solar and battery power to bolster a community center with cooling, an emergency cooling plan during power outages, a high-school run air quality monitoring program and a tool that warns drivers about traffic at a local bridge to reduce congestion and avoid idling cars. The conservation alliance will also help the city build three detention ponds to mitigate flooding, a project the city has in its plans but has not been able to afford.

Christina Hernandez, co-director of the conservation alliance, said it worked with Rodriguez, the 19-year-old environmentalist, to choose the programs they wanted to include in the proposal. For the most part, the projects will support already existing infrastructure.

Hernandez said the organization plans to start building by the end of January. They expect the full scale of the proposal to be completed in about three years.

“We know that the city is already stretched really thin,” Hernandez said. “But this is work that's really important and needs to be done.”

A town of roughly 3,000, Presidio is a border community just steps from Ojinaga, Mexico. It’s also northwest of Big Bend National Park. People have lived there for hundreds of years, according to the Texas State Historical Association. Some records trace its origins to the 15th century. It formally became a city in the 1980s.

Presidio relies on property taxes and a landfill it allows other cities to use for its revenue, which amounts to about $4 million. The city stretches that budget to fund its emergency services and police department, said Presidio Mayor John Ferguson.

Many of the trails that pass for roads need to be paved. Portions of the city do not have a sewage system. Ferguson said the city functions much like a colonia, impoverished border communities with little to no municipal infrastructure that are predominantly Hispanic.

“We’re doing the best we can. It’s frustrating to not be able to do more,” Ferguson said, adding the city will lend a hand to the conservation alliance.

Joni Carswell, president and CEO of Texan by Nature, a conservation nonprofit supporting such projects statewide, said cities need to strengthen their infrastructure to withstand hotter temperatures and preserve water sources.

Conservation projects across the state have restored ecosystems, including longleaf pines in East Texas and redfish nurseries on the coast, and a watershed on Baffin Bay 50 miles south of Corpus Christi.

In a report published last year, the group found that nearly 200 nonprofit organizations in Texas spent $639 million on restoration, education, policy and programs related to environmental conservation.

“Presidio has an opportunity to show how beneficial a federal grant at this size can be because we have small rural communities all over the state that are in need of this type of funding,” Caldwell said.

Rodriguez first became passionate about the environment in elementary school, after he learned about the town’s first recycling center. He created Project Homeleaf in his school’s cafeteria, named after the place he wanted to improve and the kind of change he wanted to see. Mostly made up of teenage volunteers, the group found neighborhoods with the least shade and helped residents plant trees. They fundraised by selling baked goods.

They recruited people to volunteer at the town’s recycling center. It taught elementary school students about conserving the environment with a group of students who called themselves the Climate Crew.

Rodriguez began working with the Big Bend Conservation Alliance in high school. One of his first projects with the group was planting more trees. The group has also worked to end light pollution, expand community gardens and preserve tribal land. As of December, he is the conservation alliance’s program manager, overseeing many of the projects funded by the grant. The money the conservation alliance won funds this position.

Rodriguez wants his hometown to be lush with green roadways, which he said will bond neighborhoods.

“Presidio won't look the same in three years,” he said. “And in a very good way.”

Disclosure: Air Alliance Houston and Texas State Historical Association have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.