Many area highway projects soon will grind to a halt

Transportation expansion projects underway by the Missouri Department of Transportation look to be the last communities will see for quite a while.

A huge hit coming for the agency's budget will mean expansion projects such as new bridges and widening of major highways throughout the state won't happen during the next five years.

The Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission last week approved the 2016-2020 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program, which lays out plans for expanding and improving the state's routes. For the first time in the program's history, no expansion projects were added, commission chairman Stephen R. Miller said in a statement.

In the Southeast District, which covers 25 counties from the Missouri Bootheel north to Ste. Genevieve County and west to Douglas County, a few expansion projects -- including a roundabout in the city of Jackson and adding a turning lane to Main Street in Scott City -- will be finished, as will projects that are in the previous year's plans, local MoDOT representatives said Wednesday.

Others won't begin, such as a project to expand Interstate 55 to six lanes as it passes Cape Girardeau, improvements for Highway 25 into Jackson from Gordonville and the intersection of William Street and Kingshighway in Cape Girardeau, although local input determined the need for the projects.

More planned undertakings elsewhere in district, including widening major routes such as U.S. 67 south of Poplar Bluff and U.S. 412 in the Bootheel, also won't be possible.

All of those projects were on a list developed for funding through Amendment 7, a ballot measure for transportation funding rejected by voters in August. The measure would have raised hundreds of millions of dollars each year for transportation by raising fuel taxes.

MoDOT instead has announced the agency will have only $325 million available for its highways and bridges construction program in 2017 -- far less than the annual amount it takes to even maintain the state's 35,000-mile transportation system. MoDOT also reports it won't be able to match federal highway funds, meaning those funds will go to other states, said Matt Seiler, an assistant district engineer for MoDOT based in Sikeston, Missouri.

The agency gets as much as 70 percent of its funding from state fuel taxes, but inflation has taken a toll on how much buying power MoDOT has during a more than 20-year period the tax has remained the same, Seiler said.

The "325 Plan" of the agency for maintenance calls for primary routes -- about 8,000 miles of roads -- to be maintained by today's standards. The remaining 26,000 miles of roads will "receive limited, routing maintenance," a recent agency newsletter stated.

"For those, all we can do is take care of them with a dumptruck and a shovel," Seiler said. "People, I don't think, will realize that's a problem until they start to fall apart."

Because MoDOT contracts out projects, contractors will continue to feel the burn of funding cuts.

"There are not enough dollars in Missouri to keep them busy," he said.

The agency's first contract awards of the year "were the lowest in memory at only $7 million, and there is no bid letting scheduled for this coming month -- not a good situation for Missouri contractors who are now seeking work in our neighboring states, where their prospects are brighter," Miller stated.

Also soon to go are the opportunities for cities to share in the cost of major improvement projects, said Chauncy Buchheit, executive director of the Southeast Missouri Regional Planning Commission.

Those projects can aid economic development through creating better transportation access, Buchheit said. An industrial park road under construction in Perryville, Missouri, helping lead to the hiring of more workers, is one example of the type of project that could suffer from MoDOT's shortfall.

The Perryville project will continue like the Jackson roundabout, because it was included in previous funding plans, Buchheit said.

Buchheit said he also was concerned about the condition of the state's roads for the transportation and logistics industry.

"We have a lot of potential out there. I hate to see our roads go down," he said.

eragan@semissourian.com

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