Some see a sign as road changes

BELLA VISTA - With a single sign, Interstate 49 became a reality in Arkansas on Tuesday morning.

With state Highway Commission members looking on, the U.S. 71 sign was removed from its signpost on the southbound lane near Exit 93, taking a major step toward joining a projected transportation corridor that will stretch from New Orleans to the U.S.-Canadian border. Over the next several months, hundreds of existing highway signs on Interstate 540 between Alma and the Missouri-Arkansas border will be replaced.

The event was a capstone to the morning’s activities, which primarily focused on the opening of the first 3-mile section of the planned Bella Vista Bypass.

The bypass will eventually reroute highway traffic from Exit 93 on I-49 to the Missouri state line west of Bella Vista, eventually rejoining U.S. 71 near Pineville, Mo.

Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department spokesman Randy Ort said the Arkansas portion of the bypass will cost approximately $150 million for construction of a two-lane road with interchanges. Ort said Highway Department officials are hoping that $100 million more in funding will eventually materialize to expand the bypass to four lanes of traffic.

Once the full bypass is complete, it will officially become part of I-49.

State Rep. Dan Douglas, R-Bentonville, said he expected the effect of the bypass, once completed, to be a strong component for the business and manufacturing centers in Northwest Arkansas.

“Getting the through traffic out of Bella Vista, that will be huge,” Douglas said. “All you’ve got to do is go down and try to get through Bella Vista at 5 o’clock on a Friday afternoon - or any afternoon - and you’ll see we’ve got to have some relief to that congestion.”

“Right now you can go from Bella Vista to Alma without a stoplight, but boy, you get in Bella Vista, you’ve got a bunch of them, and the traffic just piles up. So this is going to be huge,” Douglas said.

The section of the bypass opened Tuesday cost approximately $20 million. Danny Straessle, also a spokesman for the Highway Department, said a Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation covered $10 million of the total cost, and the remainder was funded through use of state and federal gasoline taxes.

But despite the passage of a half-cent sales tax in 2012, which will provide about $1.8 billion to the Highway Department over the next decade, other major sources of revenue are in decline. The Federal Highway Trust Fund, which has contributed approximately $40 billion to state highway operations nationwide for each of the past five years, is projected to run out of money at the end of September.

Highway Department Director Scott Bennett, addressing a room of area legislators Tuesday morning at the Arkansas World Trade Center in Rogers before the bypass opening, said the department has already begun adjusting construction plans in anticipation of the decreased revenue.

“[The trust fund is] going dry. It’s a reality,” Bennett said. “Projections are, if Congress doesn’t do something to shore up the highway trust fund, we’re going to hit zero in August of this year. What that means is we can’t let any more federal aid highway projects [to bids].”

Bennett said federal money funds about 70 percent of road construction throughout the state.

“There’s still going to be some money coming in, but it won’t be enough, really, to even pay our existing obligations. They’re going to slow down reimbursement for existing obligations.”

Bennett said the department pulled 10 projects totalling $60 million from a bid letting process last week. “If something doesn’t happen before next year, we’ve got another 56 projects, totalling about $500 million, that we won’t be able to let to contract,” Bennett said.

Additionally, the Highway Department has been unable to keep up with maintenance of both roads and equipment across the state, Bennett said, despite spending about $12 million annually on maintenance. Bennett said the average age of the department’s 3,000 pieces of equipment was between 12 and 13 years - about five years over most road equipment’s “optimal age.”

“What we’re planning on doing is adding about $6 million a year to our equipment budget to kind of get us back to where we were about 10 years ago,” Bennett said. “But that additional $6 million a year has to come from somewhere. It’ll end up reducing our construction budget some.”

U.S. Rep. Steve Womack said he and other legislators have been trying to persuade members of the congressional Transportation Committee to help fund the bypass project and to generally help alleviate the looming highway funding crisis in Arkansas.

“It’s a bit problematical for us right now,” Womack said. “We’re a bit handcuffed, in the sense that we don’t have the capacity to do congressionally directed spending earmarks as we once did.”

Womack said he had personally tried to convince committee Chairman Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., of the relationship between the completion of the bypass “and its relationship to job creation and economic vitality in the area.”

Two additional sections of the bypass are now designated as “under construction” by the Highway Department: A 6.4-mile segment connecting the eastern end of the newly completed section to I-49 at Exit 93, and a 2.5-mile section extending northward from the western end of the completed section near Gravette.