Call it the good, the bad and the ugly of Kansas transportation.
The good is that Kansas now has $8.2 billion to spend on transportation over the next 10 years thanks to the T-WORKS bill that passed earlier this year.
The bad is that of that $8.2 billion, only $1.7 billion will be used on new construction and modernization, less than half of the $4 billion spent in the last Comprehensive Transportation Plan.
The ugly is that only $125 million to $225 million of that money will be spent over 10 years in southeast Kansas.
The Kansas Department of Transportation hosted a workshop in Pittsburg on Thursday for the Southeast region to prepare local leaders for the local consult meetings coming in October. The results from those meetings will be used to help determine which highway construction projects get funding under T-WORKS.
“The purpose of this workshop is twofold,” said Julie Lorenz, KDOT director of public affairs. “First, there is new funding available under T-WORKS, and we are using new approaches and new models. Second, there are a certain amount of funds available for each region. There are only so many highway improvements that can be done here, and we want to know which improvements will help the best.”
In effect, this was just a trial run, a dress rehearsal so to speak, for the local consult meetings in October. The dates and places of those meetings have not been officially announced.
But there is plenty to consider for local officials. At Thursday’s meeting, KDOT helped narrow thinking to 18 projects that continued to come up in local consultation meetings. These include such projects as modernizing Kansas Highway 7 from Cherokee to Columbus, expanding U.S. 75 Highway from Oklahoma to U.S. 400 Highway, and expanding U.S. 169 to four lanes from north of Coffeyville to U.S. 400.
Perhaps nothing will garner more discussion than the 10 projects that constitute the four-lane expansion of U.S. Highways 69 and 400.
However there is more to the discussion than simply choosing which projects can be built. Several projects have multiple options that can help more projects get build.
For instance, the project known as the Crawford County Corridor, from the Crawford/Cherokee county line to north of Arma, can be built in four different ways. It can be built as a four-lane freeway, which would be $238 million, more than the entire amount of funding for the entire region over 10 years. Or it could be built as a two-on-four, with two lanes of highway being built on four lanes of right-of-way and building interchanges for $155 million. But then the option exists just to do the first phase of that project, from north of Arma to U.S. 160 as a freeway, which would cost just $75 million or as a two-on-four for $51 million.
