STREET WORK COULD BENEFIT FROM DISCUSSIONS

Cape Girardeau city streets recently have provided drivers -- accustomed to a reasonable ebb and flow of traffic -- something more akin to an arcade game. Detours have popped up everywhere as the city pursues its regular repaving schedule plus six Transportation Trust Fund projects.

Those detours are irritating to residents who sometimes have to make more than one alternate route on their way to work or school or while running errands. And some open streets have been scraped, leaving manhole covers exposed and abrupt bumps in the pavement as work seems to stall.

A real estate agent says she makes so many detours while showing properties it leaves potential homeowners confused. Certainly everyone interested in keeping Cape Girardeau growing would rather potential buyers have a positive experience and be left with the impression the city runs smoothly.

The development has a planning and zoning commission member concerned. Harry Rediger worries motoring voters will have a bad taste when it comes to approving another extension of the Transportation Trust Fund sales tax in 2005.

Rediger and this newspaper, plus many others, continue to support the Transportation Trust Fund concept, which sets aside revenue from a special city sales tax for clearly identified major street projects. In the years the fund and tax have been in place, several major street improvements have been made.

The projects currently under construction also will make city streets better and safer. It's not the projects that are causing consternation. It's the seemingly haphazard way those projects have been scheduled. Coupled with the repaving projects and other street work such as replacing water lines another important improvement plus the perceived unnecessary inconvenience of waiting for projects to be completed, motorists have grown irritable and have questioned the wisdom of how the projects are being managed.

City manager Michael Miller says this summer's inconvenience was unavoidable. Road projects have to be done in warm-weather months, meaning they often coincide with each other and with the start of classes at schools and the university. Reasonable detours have been arranged, Miller says.

As for the manhole covers, he says the city's policy is to keep scraped streets open as long as possible and to post easy-to-see warnings about the conditions. But the main reason the projects have lumped up all at once, he says, is Transportation Trust Fund projects are done on a pay-as-you-go basis. The money came in, so the projects were scheduled.

He points to projects being completed well under the contracted time. The widening of New Madrid Street was scheduled to be done in November but will open next month. Still, there are days when that project has few -- if any -- workers on hand to speed up the process.

Still, when the city's customers -- residents and visitors who pay the sales tax and use the roads -- aren't satisfied, the overall system needs to be examined. Are projects being scheduled in the most efficient manner? Are they being completed in a reasonable amount of time?

So far, many residents would answer no, which makes Rediger's proposal even more timely that the city council and planning commission should meet to discuss the volume and scheduling of road work.