CHARLESTON — Don’t expect to see toll booths mushroom on major arteries in southern West Virginia, even though Gov. Joe Manchin is moving toward the pay-as-you-drive concept to get more key highways built. Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox used his appearance Tuesday before a Senate panel to plug Manchin’s concept of altering a state law to expand toll roads.
Mattox, however, voiced serious doubts that toll booths would ever come online along either the King Coal Highway or Coalfields Expressway, both designed to serve isolated residents in southern counties. And the reason is simple: Not enough potential traffic to justify them.
While he hasn’t examined the bill in its entirety, Mattox told the Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Committee the idea calls for a change in the state law that provides for the West Virginia Parkways Authority.
Whether this would mean the authority — now the governing board for the state’s only toll highway, the West Virginia Turnpike — would oversee future toll roads is yet to be ascertained.
In some instances, Mattox said, toll roads would be the answer to the Division of Highways’ diminishing cash flow in efforts to build and maintain key highways. “You’ve got to have enough traffic on the road to justify a toll to pay for construction costs of the road,” Mattox told reporters afterward. “We don’t have very many roads in West Virginia that meet that criteria.”
At this stage, Mattox wasn’t certain if any roads in southern counties could meet that standard. “Really, the only two areas we’ve looked at is U.S. 35 in Mason-Putnam counties and U.S. 522 in Morgan County,” he said. “We’ve not done anything at all in Morgan County because the public up there was against a toll road. If local citizens are not for it, then it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for us to pursue it.”
For now, it appears neither King Coal nor Coalfields Expressway would impose a toll on users once the highways are complete.
“Based on what I’ve seen in the traffic numbers and the cost of construction, it’s just not a financial situation where a toll road could be used to construct those highways,” Mattox said.
Once it opens, however, the Mon-Fayette Expressway will be a toll facility, he said.
Mattox told the panel the governor also is pushing for legislation that would alter certain motor vehicle fees, which haven’t been raised since 1971.
The secretary ran through a litany of expensive road projects laid out by the DOH and pointed to a dwindling revenue stream at a time when fuel and asphalt costs are soaring at a pace that is frustrating the state from keeping up.
“All of these projects come at a very hefty price tag,” he told the Senate panel.
Even snow and ice removal has emerged as an expensive undertaking, he said, noting salt that normally runs $40 a ton shot up to $120 a year ago.
Despite the tight money times, Mattox said, the state laid 80 miles of four-lane highway in recent years, including 14 miles of the King Coal Highway and 9 miles of the Coalfields Expressway, with 2 more miles of the latter advertised last month.
“My hope is that 2010 could be the most accomplished year the DOH has ever seen,” he said.