CHARLESTON — Senate Majority Whip Billy Wayne Bailey envisions the day when tollbooths are taking in money along major roads feeding into the West Virginia Turnpike. That, he suggested Tuesday, is one potential solution to the dwindling resources the Division of Highways is being forced to rely on while construction costs keep spiraling upward.
“The turnpike authority needs to wake up and realize the universe is not 88 miles long,” the co-chairman of Finance Subcommittee C said after Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox painted a grim scenario of future funding. “They need to think outside the box and look at these roads that feed into the turnpike to see if they can’t toll them.”
About 80 percent of the traffic departing U.S. Route 35 heads south along the turnpike, while such works in progress — King Coal Highway and Coalfields Expressway — ultimately will usher motorists to the state’s only toll road, he said.
“They should have stepped up to the plate long ago and said, ‘Look, we’re the toll authority of West Virginia. Where there’s a need, let us do the assessment and let us build the road,’” he said. “There’s more than Charleston to Princeton with Beckley in-between.”
Erecting toll barriers on other roads would be no different an approach than other states have pursued to make up for shortages in road cash, Bailey, D-Wyoming, said afterward.
“Go to Richmond,” he said. “If you don’t have a pocket full of quarters, you can’t drive around that town. Every place you go, you’ve got to throw 50 cents in a basket to get to the next 5 miles of the road.”
Hard times have hit road-building efforts across the nation, and the newest federal highway budget sets aside $119.4 million less than what the state has counted on, or a 34 percent decrease, Mattox told the panel.
That translates into a potential loss of 4,154 jobs, Mattox said.
Even if Congress restores the amount, a presidential veto is threatened, although Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick, D-Pocahontas, said such action would be “unprecedented.”
Starting with fiscal 2006, the transportation secretary said, the Manchin administration has assembled three $500 million budgets in a row, and that is unprecedented.
Yet, with inflation figured in, Helmick said, the real dollars would amount to around $300 million annually.
Since December 2003, the cost of construction and maintenance components have soared by 71.2 percent, Mattox told the panel.
Asphalt has risen 81.6 percent, cement is up 40.1 percent and steel for bridge-making has leaped by 134.7 percent. In fact, in the proposed federal budget, a mere $10 million for West Virginia is targeted — hardly enough to erect a single span, Mattox said.
As dollars grow shorter, Mattox said, the Department of Transportation is shifting more toward a focus of maintenance rather than construction.
“We are becoming more effective in the way we do business,” he told the legislators.
Looking at other states, Mattox said the money problem is a common one — demands for roads are outstripping the money to build them.
Federal money is allocated for the 10,315 miles of U.S. government roads in West Virginia, which also maintains more than 23,000 miles of state-owned ones.
Mattox prepared some shocking statistics based on the rate of federal contributions for completing some major thoroughfares in West Virginia. The amount of federal dollars already received by a particular project figured into the equation.
For instance, with $919 million needed to complete it, the 80-mile Coalfields Expressway would take 172 years. Finishing the 21-mile Shawnee Parkway for $317 million would take 879 years. The East Beckley bypass, extending 8 miles and with $112 million needed, wouldn’t be completed for another 140 years.
King Coal Highway, a 105-mile project, needs $1.5 billion, and would be 94 years away from the finish line. At a remaining cost of $62 million, the 10-mile New River Parkway wouldn’t be open for 86 years.
Joe Denault, representing Keep West Virginia Moving, a citizens group striving to get roads built, cautioned the panel there is “no silver bullet” for capturing the needed money. “There is no white knight out there in shining armor,” he said. “It’s going to be hard work for everyone.”
