Highway dilemma: State funding short of needs

Missouri’s road and bridge needs have outstripped money to pay for them for many years now, and the short-term funding spurt – which has helped in recent years – is coming to a close. Just when the state needs more, it’ll have substantially less.

The Department of Transportation has nonetheless drawn up a long list of road and bridges that need work. The 66 projects come to $31.4 billion over the next 20 years. The problem is MoDOT only has a projected $12.6 billion available.

A person who travels the state regularly could comb through the list and find himself saying something like, “Oh, yeah, I know that little stretch of road. It should have been four lanes years ago.” MoDOT’s list is full of those. Closer to home, the priorities include:

• The interchange at Interstates 70 and 435 near the stadiums. That one will be a headache, but it’s overdue.

• Improvements along I-70 from downtown Kansas City to Interstate 70 in southeast Independence. Same as above – a series of hassles during construction but overdue.

• What MoDOT calls “capacity improvements” along I-470, from its northern end in Independence all the way to U.S. 50 in Lee’s Summit. For some reason, this is one drivers particularly like to treat like a racetrack – even when both lanes both ways are crowded, as is often the case.

That’s just Eastern Jackson County, and can anyone imagine any of these three of them not being needed in next five or 10 years, let alone 20? Under current funding, two of those three likely wouldn’t get done.

Then throw in some of the dozens of others: making Missouri 13 four lanes wide from Lexington to Clinton; improving U.S. 71 to interstate standards from Kansas City of Joplin; work on bridges at Truman Lake, Lake of the Ozarks and Table Rock Lake. There’s a case for each, but current funding is only enough for about four out of 10.

So the $31 billion question is where the money comes from. It will come – if it comes – from our taxes. MoDOT’s chief engineer Kevin Keith is blessedly blunt in assessing a huge part of the problem. “We have found it is difficult to get Missourians interested in long-term transportation planning in general,” he says, adding that “they get pretty excited and engaged in the project that impacts them.”

No one running for office – governor, for example – likes to talk about taxes, but we will have a new governor in six months, and he or she is going to have to deal with this. He or she needs to engage Missouri’s citizen/taxpayers in a frank discussion of priorities.