W.Va. needs to build roads

W.Va. needs to build roads  

Publication: Charleston Daily Mail
Release Date: 02/19/08

TEN years ago, then-Gov. Cecil Underwood visited McDowell County at the request of Democratic Delegate Emily Yeager. Her county suffered 11.5 percent unemployment - 4 points higher than the state average.

She was hoping for help in building needed roads.

Today, the plans are still on the drawing board. The King Coal Highway and the Coalfields Expressway in McDowell County are no closer than the colonization of the moon.

Likewise, unemployment in McDowell County was 3.5 points higher than the state average. Better, but at this rate it will take 70 years to meet the state average.

Elsewhere, segments of the King Coal Highway are being built.

In October, Consol Energy, for example, agreed to build five miles of roadbed for the highway in Mingo County, as part of its reclamation plan for a surface mine. That will cut the costs of building that segment of the 95-mile highway.

This is a good example of one type of public-private partnership. Toll roads are another possibility.

The fact is, McDowell County cannot wait for state and federal highway money to fall from the sky. There simply is not enough highway money out there.

To this end, state Sen. Brooks McCabe, D-Kanawha, has proposed the Public-Private Transportation Act to make innovative agreements easier to reach.

"Progress is passing us by," McCabe told Mannix Porterfield of the Register-Herald in Beckley. "We've got much to do. We don't have a strong enough economy to spend the dollars for infrastructure that we need to spend.

"We've got to find other sources," he said. "We've got to leverage our federal and state dollars. Public-private venture is one way, in theory, we could do that."

West Virginia simply cannot sit back and wait for the nation's taxpayers to bail it out. The Appalachian corridor highways project was a once-in-a-lifetime deal, and even it has been slow in coming. Corridor H is still under construction 40 years after these plans were first drafted.

McCabe's idea has merit. West Virginia needs ways to build the highways it needs more quickly.