Fort Worth District Engineer

Maribel P. Chavez, P.E., is the district engineer for the Fort Worth District of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). The district comprises nine counties: Erath, Hood, Jack, Johnson, Palo Pinto, Parker, Somervell, Tarrant and Wise.

A TxDOT employee since 1983, she began her career as an engineering assistant in the Pecos Area Office. She has held positions as design engineer and assistant field operations engineer in the Odessa District Office, as area engineer in Pecos, and as executive assistant to Texas Transportation Commissioner Ray Stoker Jr. She worked as Abilene district engineer before her appointment in 1998 as district engineer in El Paso.

Since being named Fort Worth district engineer in January 2002, Chavez has served on the Regional Transportation Council of the North Central Texas Council of Governments working to solve Metroplex-area transportation issues. Due to the district’s ability to complete design projects accurately and on-time for TxDOT’s submission schedules, the Fort Worth District received the Design Excellence Award for a Metropolitan District in 2007 for the sixth-time since the award’s inception in 1997. As district engineer, Chavez currently oversees $3 billion in public-private partnerships for the DFW Connector and North Tarrant Express and over $500 million in traditional construction work. In addition, she is overseeing $433 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funded construction and maintenance projects, which includes $250 million allocated to the DFW Connector.

A native of Pecos, Chavez earned her bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a graduate of the Leadership Texas Program and has presided as board chair for the West Texas Chapter of Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering. Chavez was the 1996 recipient of the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Award and was named Woman of the Year in 2004 by the Dallas-Fort Worth Chapter of the Women’s Transportation Seminar.

She and her husband, Daniel, have four children Jeremy, Billy, Kelli and Amelia.