By Mannix Porterfield
REGISTER-HERALD REPORTER, Oct. 10, 2009
If one word describes the financial outlook for highway needs in West Virginia into the near future, it would be “grim.” And you won’t get an argument on that from either Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox or Joe Deneault, chairman of West Virginians for Better Transportation.
Even so, Deneault’s group hopes a Nov. 10 conference in Beckley can spur some fresh ideas into ways of generating money so the state’s road needs are met, and, as a result, West Virginia’s economy can take off. “Without everybody kind of putting their shoulder to the wheel, we’re not going to get this problem solved,” Deneault said Friday.
“But if we put our minds together, we can come up with the best possible solutions. People can kind of build off each other’s ideas and come up with maybe innovative solutions to our problems. And I don’t think there’s any one silver bullet that’s going to solve our problems.”
Headlining the event at the Mountaineer Conference Center at Country Inns & Suites will be Mattox, Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va., and Gov. Joe Manchin.
Additionally, the conference has invited four key leaders from the Legislature — Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin, D-Logan, House Speaker Rick Thompson, D-Wayne, Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick, D-Pocahontas, and House Finance Chairman Harry Keith White, D-Mingo.
Mattox agreed money for highway needs is scarce and the outlook for the next few years is less than rosy.
“You can look at our past 12 years and into the future the next six years, and it’s very flat,” he said during a West Virginia Parkways Authority meeting Thursday in Beckley. “There’s little or no growth, maybe even a slight decline in the state road fund.”
Matttox said he plans to simply lay out the hard facts of life on highway funding, but, on the positive side, says next month’s West Virginia Transportation Conference could be a useful tool.
“Any time you can get the facts out and engage the public and tell folks where you’re at, where you’re hoping to go with the resources you have to work with, I think it’s a good thing,” he said.
When it comes to available money, Deneault likewise is a realist. “We’ve got a crisis of funding for transportation in West Virginia,” he said. “These (public leaders) are the folks that are the most knowledgeable about how we might go about solving that problem. I really hope that we’re going to hear from them ideas we can work on in the near term to bring consistent, adequate funding for transportation for West Virginia.”
Talk has increased in recent months among some leaders about installing toll booths in other parts of West Virginia as a means of leveraging some capital.
Deneault, however, emphasized his group doesn’t prescribe to any particular policy with regard to transportation needs. “One of the things we’ve been very careful not to do is to try to endorse any particular solution because what we believe needs to happen is there needs to be debate about all of them,” he said.
“To me, everything needs to be on the table. We just need to make people concerned enough about transportation that they talk about it.”
Nor does his organization narrow its scope to a specific area. “One of the real difficulties is that we can’t regionalize things,” Deneault said. “We’ve got to look at everything and say, ‘Hey, we need to have a network of roads that brings prosperity to West Virginia — all of West Virginia.’”