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Completion of 1987 Highway plan for Delta anticipated this year

by Julie Whitehead
DBJ Contributing Writer

Central District Highway Commissioner Dick Hall, retiring Northern District Highway Commissioner Zack Stewart, and District 3 engineer Walter Lyons were all in on the 1987 Four-Lane Highway Program from the beginning—Hall as a legislator helping override Governor Bill Allain’s veto, Stewart as a newly elected highway commissioner shepherding the process along, and Lyons as a member of the original planning teams lining out the roads to be upgraded in the program.

They all three should see the fruits of their labor in the Delta in 2004 as new lanes are nearly completed on Highways 61 and 49 and work continues on Highway 82 and Interstate 69, all expected to bring new economic activity to the area.

The passage of the 1987 Four-Lane Highway bill mandated that certain highways be four-laned, rather than waiting for traffic counts to meet levels already set in law, according to Stewart; planners expected the projects to cost $1.6 billion and be completed by 2000, according to Stewart. “We promised people they’d have a strong four-lane highway system within 12-14 years,” Stewart says. However, cost overruns due to language in the bill requiring existing lanes to be completely rebuilt pushed the figure to $2.5 billion and the completion past the original 2000 date. “Some people were disappointed that it took longer and cost more money than was originally expected,” Stewart says.

But Stewart said even during the planning stage, he was skeptical about the amount of time it would take to finish some projects. “I can recall going to Clarksdale and the people who wanted four-lane access from Clarksdale to Memphis wanted to know how long it would be. I told them with the traffic counts they had at the time, it would be about forty years,” Stewart says. “The only part of Highway 61 that justified it was from Tunica to Memphis.”

But within the next 12 months, the southbound lanes of Highway 61 in north Bolivar County from Shelby to Clarksdale should be completed, while work on two lanes on Highway 49 from Silver City to Yazoo City should end in late 2004, according to Lyons. Both highways are designed to link the Delta to the major commerce centers for the Mississippi area. “Sometime in 2005, Highway 61 should be four-laned from Leland to Memphis,” says Lyons. “(Highway 49)’s going to be four-lane access from Jackson to the Delta. You’re going to increase the mobility and safety by so much.”

Chip Morgan, executive vice president of the Delta Council, said that both projects exemplify the twin goals of the 1987 program. “One is to put a four-lane highway within 30 minutes over every citizen. The other is to open up economic opportunity with a four-lane highway to the capital and to Memphis,” Morgan says. “In public policy, you hardly ever bat 100%, and on this project, we did.”

The payoff of four-lane access has already come with congestion difficulties relieved around Indianola and Inverness from Lewis Grocery due to the improvements on Highway 49, said Morgan.

Continuing projects include four-lane work on Highway 82, including completing the Greenville Bridge to Arkansas and building the proposed Highway 82 Bypass around Greenville to the bridge. Federal action is critical to this project, according to Hall. “The federal highway program authorization has expired, and they’ve extended it temporarily for five months. We hope to have it reauthorized next year,” says Hall, who met with the Delta’s congressional delegation in December to work on the issue.

Hall estimates that $100 million will be needed to complete the Highway 82 bypass and $120 million to build approaches in both Arkansas and Mississippi to the Greenville Bridge. Other four-lane work for Highway 82, from Kilmichael to the Webster County line, is included in the regular state appropriations, according to Hall. “All of these (projects) are a partnership between the state and the federal government,” says Hall. “Our congressional delegation does a great job of getting us the resources we need.”

The work on Highway 82 has also borne fruit for Delta economic developers with the Dollar General midsouth distribution center located on that major transportation artery, says Morgan. “I’m not going that’s the only reason we got it, but without that, we wouldn’t have even been in the hunt,” says Morgan.

Planning for the proposed I-69 is still underway, with three routes from Benoit to Cleveland undergoing environment impact studies, says Lyons. Morgan envisions an economic impact in the Delta from that project similar to that of the completion of I-55 from Memphis to Grenada.

Once Phase III of the 1987 program is completed, MDOT will begin implementing Vision 21, a highway plan enacted during the 2002 Legislative Session, will consolidate Phase VI of the 1987 program and the 1993 Gaming Roads Program into one ongoing highway-building plan, designed to prioritize highway funding according to changes in population, says Hall. “One mistake was we put into law (in 1987) which roads could be four-laned and in which order,” said Hall.

Stewart, who did not run for re-election in 2003, said that seeing the program through almost to the end had been a rewarding experience for him, considering it one campaign pledge kept. “It’s one of the few promises the state has kept to its people,” Stewart says. DBJ