STATE ADDRESSES ANXIETY ON HIGHWAY COST SHIFTS

Missouri Highway and Transportation Department officials Tuesday tried to calm local officials' fears that a new state transportation plan would revert maintenance of some highways to Missouri's counties.

The MHTD held a public hearing in Cape Girardeau Tuesday to hear local reaction to its new Total Transportation Plan compiled by a private consulting firm.

One of the plan's recommendations is that the state study the possibility of turning maintenance of state-maintained "lettered" county roads over to counties.

Several representatives of area county commissions said that such a plan would virtually double the counties' highway maintenance costs.

But Missouri Highway and Transportation Commissioner John Oliver of Cape Girardeau said there is no plan to realign jurisdictional responsibilities, only a recommendation that the matter be considered further. "All of you can just take a big breath and take a break," Oliver said.

Oliver said the recommendations are part of an objective "externalized" study that doesn't take into account "political realities" in the state.

He said, "One of the assets of an externalized study is one of its milestones: it doesn't take into account the political realities."

Oliver said the department would not "turn a blind eye or a deaf ear" to Missouri counties. "There isn't anything in there that says the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission is going to make you take any highways back." he said.

But several officials who attended the meeting told the highway department that any jurisdictional realignment would devastate Southeast Missouri counties' budgets.

Larry Ferrell, the attorney for the Cape Girardeau County Commission, said that if maintenance responsibilities were shifted from the state the county would be responsible for 93 percent of all the county's miles of roads.

"It would be impossible for Cape Girardeau County to undertake such a responsibility without the necessary funding from the state," Ferrell said.

He said the county would be forced to double its manpower, which, combined with equipment costs, would essentially double the needed highway budget.

"The county absolutely in no way can afford that responsibility without the full funding for that mandate," Ferrell said. He said such a proposal would be "impossible and frankly, absurd.

"If the problem is additional revenue, then we need additional revenues," he said. "If it's financial management, then we need better financial management."

Ferrell said passing maintenance costs to counties would only result in deterioration of the roads.

Bill Miller of the St. Francois County Commission said that shifting maintenance responsibilities for "lettered" roads would double that county's highway budget also.

"We've found that it's four times more expensive to maintain a hard-surface road than a gravel road," he said.

Miller said St. Francois is one of the few Missouri counties that saw considerable population growth in the past decade (23 percent). He said the burden of a ballooning highway budget would effectively stop that growth.

"That's how important it is to us that either the state continue to maintain these roads or give the county the funds necessary to maintain them," he said.

Commissioners from Wayne County, which has 700 miles of gravel roads, also said they were opposed to any shift in jurisdictional responsibilities. Commissioner Mark Hackworth said the county already is underfunded from the MHTD in terms of highway maintenance.

But Highway department Chief Engineer Wayne Muri said the company that drafted the transportation plan found that two out of every three highway miles maintained by the state in Missouri were maintained by local jurisdictions in other states.

He said state funding of such roads has resulted in a "trade-off" that has left major capital improvements unfinished. He said if county road maintenance funds had been allocated for new roads, many projects on the state's 10-year unfunded needs list would have been built.

Ferrell said Missouri should be thankful it's able to fund county road maintenance while other states don't. He said the MHTD should try to find other ways, such as a fuel tax, to fund major projects and new highways.