LITTLE ROCK — A 40-year-old dream for motorists in northeast Arkansas moved 17 miles closer to realization Thursday when a new interstate-quality, four-lane stretch of U.S. 67 from Newport north to Arkansas 226 opened to traffic Thursday morning.
The opening marks the first substantial progress in nearly 20 years on a plan conceived in the 1960s to have a four-lane highway from Little Rock to the Missouri line.
“This is something we’ve been waiting for a long time,”Jackson County Judge Kerry Tharpe said moments before his pickup became one of the first vehicles to roll over the new surface. “It’s going to help everybody. It’s got to be a great asset for the state and for Jackson County.”
People at a Thursday ribbon-cutting ceremony just north of Newport cheered the opening of the $93 million section but noted that it took nearly 40 years to widen U.S. 67 to as far as Newport, and they hope that the remaining sections will be completed more quickly than that.
State Sen. Paul Bookout,D-Jonesboro, said progress has been slow.
“It’s time this part of the state has a four-lane to the state Capitol,” said Bookout, whose father, Jerry, a former state senator, helped get the project on the state’s highway improvement plan.
Mark Lamberth of Batesville, a contractor whose company participated in the project, said progress may be slow, but it is progress nonetheless.
“I can see the end in sight,” he said. “It’s a ways off. But [opening the new section] helps in the sense that the Highway Department recognizes the significance in completing the corridor. But as you know, it’s a matter of money.”
U.S. 67 is a storied route. It is the successor to the Southwest Trail, the oldest land route through the state, dating to at least the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, three decades before Arkansas became a state. U.S. 67 has been part of the highway system since the system’s inception in Arkansas in 1923.
Before development of the interstate highway system, U.S. 67 was a heavily traveled route between Little Rock and St. Louis.
Acknowledgment of the pre-interstate highway’s importance came in March when Gov. Mike Beebe signed legislation designating U.S. 67 from Newport to Pocahontas as “Rock ‘N’ Roll Highway 67,” a tribute to the rockabilly clubs that once dotted that stretch and featured such acts as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Sonny Burgess and Billy Lee Riley.
Work on widening the highway north of Little Rock dates back nearly 50 years and represents $300 million in work over that span.
The first section of the corridor - a 15-mile stretch from Interstate 40 to the Pulaski/Lonoke county line - was completed in March 1962 at a cost of $8 million. The widening reached Newport in 1991 when an eight-mile section from Arkansas 224 to Arkansas 17 was completed for $20.5 million.
Beebe, a native of the region and graduate of Newport High School, cut the ribbon for the new stretch of highway Thursday. The section just adds more to the “safety and the ease of travel and gets us [a four-lane road] closer to Jonesboro,” he said.
In his remarks Thursday, Beebe reiterated a belief long held in the region that U.S. 67, once it is widened from Little Rock to Missouri, could become part of Interstate 30 down to Texarkana and into Texas. That could take some of the heavy truck traffic off Interstate 40 between Memphis and Little Rock, he said.
Beebe said he remembers when the trip to Little Rock was over two lanes, though he quickly noted that the roads were already paved when he was a boy.
“There’s no comparison” between then and now, he said after cutting the ribbon. “It’s easier, safer and quicker” today.
Officials in Newport, which has been trying to regain its economic footing in recent years, hope the road work will become an economic-development tool.The August 2009 unemployment rate in Jackson County was 9.5 percent. The other three counties the highway runs through between Newport and the Missouri line - Lawrence, Randolph and Clay - have unemployment rates higher than the state’s 7.1 percent average.
“It’s a great road,” said Kenneth Grady of Newport,the owner of Grady Auctions. “I don’t know if it will help Newport, but I hope it does.”
The newest four-lane section, which is the longest stretch of interstate-standard highway built in the state since a 32-mile section of Interstate 540 opened in 1991, was built in two phases. The first phase, about 10 miles from Arkansas 18 to Arkansas 37, was built at a cost of $53.5 million. From Arkansas 37 to Arkansas 226, a distance of about seven miles, the cost was $39.6 million. Construction began in 2001.
Even before the last orange barrel had been picked up to allow traffic to pass Thursday,people in the region were looking forward the next section opening.
“We are working on that,” Cliff Hoofman of North Little Rock, the member of the Arkansas Highway Commission who represents the area, told a crowd on hand for the opening.
Three contracts totaling $36.5 million have been awarded on the 16 miles between Arkansas 226 and the Walnut Ridge/Hoxie bypass. The latest contract - for $24.8 million - was awarded in May for work on grading and structures from Arkansas 230 to the bypass. Paving work is unscheduled but will start after 2011 or 2012 when the initial work is completed, said Randy Ort, a Highway and Transportation Department spokesman.
Work on the 35-40 miles from the bypass to the Missouri border is in the preliminary stages. State highway officials have identified three potential routes. One already is a four-lane road to Pocahontas. But going to the Missouri border from there might prove difficult because of environmental issues, Ort said. An environmental impact study will eventually help identify the likely route.
Ort could not predict when the entire route to the Missouri border will be complete, given the vagaries of highway construction funding.
For example, he said, it took about 40 years to build U.S. 67 from Little Rock to Newport, a distance of more than 80 miles. But it took only about a decade to build 42 miles of Interstate 540 from Alma to Fayetteville.
U.S. 67 is the “quintessential pay-as-you-go” route, in which progress is made as funds become available, Ort said. Progress on I-540 was fueled in part by congressional earmarks, he said.
“Funding dictates the pace of construction,” Ort said.
The estimated cost of widening the existing U.S. 67 from Pocahontas to the Missouri border is $315 million. The cost of building a new four-lane road could reach $500 million.
Don House of Walnut Ridge, a former state representative and longtime proponent of developing the U.S. 67 corridor, said he recognizes that state highway officials must constantly prioritize too many projects against too little money, but the region will not be economically competitive without a four-lane highway.
“It means a lot to those of us who live north of Newport,” he said.
“It’s the highway that will eventually get us out of the woods.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/16/2009