SOUTHEAST SWEETENS STREET WORK FINANCING

Southeast Missouri State University has offered the city additional financial incentives in an effort to move ahead with the New Madrid-Henderson intersection project.

Southeast wants to hire a contractor and improve the intersection before the new College of Business building opens next August.

The city would have until Jan. 1, 1999, to reimburse the university for the city's share of the $300,000 project.

The Southeast Missouri University Foundation would help pay for the project during the interim.

The city would reimburse the university with money from the five-year transportation tax, which the city will start collecting in January 1996.

The City Council will consider the new proposal Monday night.

The council last month balked at the university's initial plan to straighten out the intersection. That plan would have given the city a year to reimburse the school for the city's share.

But the city council rejected moving the project ahead of others on the priority list of projects to be paid for with the tax.

Councilmen Melvin Gateley and Richard Eggimann said such a move would have violated the city's promise to voters, who approved the transportation tax in August.

The intersection work is part of the city's $714,000 plan to rebuild New Madrid Street from Perry Avenue to the Show Me Center.

It ranks 19 out of 20 road and bridge projects slated to be financed by the transportation tax over the next five years.

The Planning and Zoning Commission and university officials want to move up the project, arguing that construction of the College of Business building just east of the intersection will dump even more traffic at that site.

Harry Rediger, chairman of the Planning and Zoning Commission, welcomed the university's new funding plan.

"We still want to go ahead with it. This would make it more palatable to everyone concerned," Rediger said Wednesday.

Dr. Ken Dobbins, Southeast's executive vice president, said both the city and the university benefit.

"The city will be able to wait until 1999 to pay for the project, but we will be able to proceed in correcting a very dangerous intersection," he said.

Dobbins said the funding plan assumes that the city on its own would have started and funded the street project by 1999.

"By bridging financing of the project to 1999, there should not be the perception that some projects are being jumped over to accomplish this," he said.

The improvements would be designed by the Sverdrup firm to city specifications. Sverdrup is managing construction of the business building.

The planning commission initially had reservations about the proposed design of the intersection.

But at a special meeting Monday, university officials and the project consultant sold the commissioners on the design.