By John Howell, Publisher
Several of us showed up last week at MDOT’s public meeting highlighting the state’s four-year (2017 to 2020) list of planned highway improvements.
That northwest Mississippi, with the exception of DeSoto and Marshall counties, is mostly left out of the improvements comes as no surprise. What Panola County gets, at a cost of $38 million, is the new bridge over the Tallahatchie River on Highway 6. That project is already under way along with replacement of lesser bridges on Highway 6 between Batesville and Clarksdale.
“That bridge costs $38 million!” Highway 6 West landowner Jeff Magee exclaimed.
No additional projects are planned for buying right-of-way, replacing the Highway 6 railway overpass, or widening Highway 6.
The money simply is not there.
I voiced my lament that from 1995 until 2005, they told us to wait while the highway routes to Tunica’s booming casinos were widened. Katrina struck the coast in 2005, and we were told to wait while bridges and roads were replaced and repaired there. By the time the hurricane-damaged highway infrastructure had been repaired, the Recession came along and money was short, so short now for so long that it’s not even on the four-year radar.
Batesville Alderman Eddie Nabors attended and was able to contact an MDOT official who told him that the median and turn lane improvements proposed for Highway 6 between I-55 and Highway 51 are also not on the four-year radar. MDOT officials allowed that the four-year plan is revised quarterly and subject to change.
Nobody voluntarily mentioned the need for an increase in fuel tax to provide badly needed highway funds, though I coaxed one MDOT official to say so.
Then I came up with an ingenious though not original alternative plan for financing highway construction. Put tolls on every state road in every direction so that we can’t go anywhere without dropping quarters into the slot. If I drive from Eureka Street to Walmart, I drop in a quarter. If I want to go back, another quarter. And so on.
Collect those quarters for five or ten years, and we could pay cash for the project to four-lane between Batesville and Clarksdale. I call it the “pay-before-you-go” highway improvement shakedown. Odds are that we’d have a shorter wait collecting those quarters than for the state and federal government to come up with the money.
As I said, it’s not an original plan. The pay-before-you-go highway shakedown has as its model the construction of the power plant in Kemper County where electricity customers’ rates were increased to pay for it years ahead of its completion.