Highway agency would tap outsider

LITTLE ROCK — The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department will hire an outside construction manager to oversee its $1.8 billion road construction program that would be funded if voters approve a tax proposal on the Nov. 6 election ballot.

The proposed constitutional amendment, formally known as Ballot Issue No. 1, would finance a $1.3 billion bond issue with a temporary half-percent sales tax and focus on four-lane highway projects that backers say will relieve congestion and improve safety but not raise taxes on groceries, medicine or gasoline.

Under the proposal, the Highway and Transportation Department would receive 70 percent of the proceeds from the tax, under a traditional split of money for state road construction, or about $160 million annually for the 10-year life of the tax. The cities and counties would split the remaining 30 percent, or about $35 million annually.

The proposal also creates a permanent state-aid street fund, similar to the existing state-aid county fund, that cities could tap for street projects. One penny of the existing per-gallon motorfuels tax, worth about $20 million a year, would go to that fund.

The department often has turned to outside consultants for design work and other services, particularly when it takes on additional road work, such as the $1.2 billion interstate repair program voters adopted a year ago. But this would mark the first time the department would hire a construction manager, said Scott Bennett, the agency director.

After Nov. 6, the department will have more than $3 billion worth of construction on its plate in a relatively short period, but department staff concluded that it would “not be an efficient use of this revenue” to hire additional employees.

“What we have to do when a consultant designs it, our staff still has to review it as if we designed it,” Bennett said Wednesday after the state Highway Commission adopted an order allowing the agency to request proposals from qualified consulting firms to manage the program. “When you add $1.8 billion worth of work, and we still have our work, and you still got the interstate repair program going on, we don’t have the staff to even check the plans.”

In addition to the regular road and bridge construction work, the department is set to undertake another round of interstate improvements over the next several years after voters last November approved a proposal that would allow the department to renew up to $575 million in bonds to finance 75 improvement projects on 455 miles of interstate.

The program will total $1.2 billion once the bond proceeds are leveraged with federal and state fuel-tax revenue. The work also will be partly financed with an existing 4-cent-per-gallon increase in the diesel fuel tax, which has been on the books since 1999.

The first three projects under the program are to be awarded contracts next month.

If voters approve Ballot Issue No. 1, about 20 four-lane projects aimed at tying the state together will be added to the mix. Among the projects:

Improve the Interstate 30 corridor from North Little Rock to Little Rock, including the widening of the I-30 bridge over the Arkansas River between the two cities.

Widening Interstate 540 to six lanes between Fayetteville and Bentonville.

Complete widening of U.S. 167 to four lanes between Interstate 530 and El Dorado, of U.S. 412 between Paragould and Walnut Ridge and of U.S. 64 between Marion and Wynne.

The construction manager would oversee the design as well as the construction of all of the projects, Bennett said.

“It lessens the number of times we have to touch it because we’re still dealing with our own programs,” he said. “They’ll review the designs, they’ll review the invoices, they’ll basically hand everything to us and certify that it meets all of our standards, and then we’ll have to go and spotcheck. But it’s not like we’ll do a detailed review of every set of plans for this $1.8 billion worth of work.”