Transportation Trust Fund 7 committee holds first meeting; discusses ways to evaluate upcoming projects

The Transportation Trust Fund 7 (TTF7) committee became familiar with the fund’s history and the projects still in the works while members met for the first time Wednesday, July 7, at Cape Girardeau City Hall.

The city rolls out a new TTF plan to voters every five years. The seventh plan will go to voters on the April 2025 ballot. The fund is supported by a one-half of one percent sales tax. The city is still finishing projects from the TTF 5 and TTF 6 plans, approved by voters in 2015 and 2020.

Public Works director Casey Brunke said TTF historically started with addressing new roads but at the end of its fourth round of projects started to hear the need to focus on taking care of older roads. She said starting with TTF5, projects began to focus more on maintenance.

“It's kind of shifted to, 'Let's take care of what we have, and listen to the citizens and voters on that,' and I think we've done a good job of coming up with projects. The committee has done a good job of coming up with projects,” Brunke said.

She also broke down how much money goes into the maintenance projects. Brunke said in general, the city receives about $25 million for maintenance from TTF, with some money set aside from the Capital Improvement Sales Tax (CIST), and from the Public Works operating budget they receive about $90,000 a year for street maintenance.

Former mayor and current committee member Harry Redinger said as they approach TTF7, they could be a little bit more balanced in terms of maintaining old roads and building new ones.

When asked a question about the process by board member Tamara Zellars Buck, city engineer Jake Garrard also spoke about the costs of how making sidewalks Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant adds to the expense of a project. Garrard described the city as making “leaps and bounds” of progress in ADA compliance.

Despite the progress, he said essentially if there is a project that is bigger than just pothole patching, it sets off ADA requirements and the city has to fix the sidewalks.

“We did West End (Boulevard), all of the pedestrian infrastructure along West End had to be brought up to ADA with our asphalt overlay. We fix the entire block of the street, we have to fix the sidewalks,” Garrard said.

City planner Ryan Shrimplin told the committee that between now and the next meeting, they will come up with ideas for upcoming maintenance projects. He said once they have the list of the projects, the members will be given criteria that they can score the projects with.

The categories for scoring include asking what the member thinks the street’s condition is and what the safety level of it is, along with other criteria.

The TTF committee will submit proposals for street projects to the council in November or December.

Brunke said city streets are given a rating on their condition every other year, through a system that was developed for runways for the Air Force. TTF7 committee chairman Jeff Maurer said it might be good if members could get a list of those streets to make public. Garrard was concerned that would be too much data considering it has 223 miles of street broken down block by block. Instead of a full list, Buck said it might be a good idea to get a list of the bottom 25% of streets.

“If we knew the worst roads, that gives me some comparisons, as I'm going out, well, this one's not on the list, but I think it might end up (on it),” Buck said.

“To me, part of the idea of putting it out is the transparency to people around what the ranking from the worst to the, you know, at least the bottom 25%,” Maurer said.

The members also talked together about ways the public could have more information and send in ideas, either through mailers, Facebook or using the news media by sending out news releases.

At the meeting, Trae Bertrand was named as the committee’s vice chairman. The next meeting is set to happen in August but the exact date hasn't been set.

Committee members are Maurer, Bertrand, Scott Blank, Buck, Shad Burner, Brock Freeman, Gerry Jones, Nick Martin, Sommer McCauley-Perdue, Mike Peters, Redinger and Joe Uzoaru.