[02/05/01] Legislation providing a deadline for the state Gaming Roads Program to use gambling taxes to build roads must be repealed to complete many local projects, Central District Transportation Commissioner Dick Hall said Friday.

“That program is so terribly under-funded that it (the 2012 cutoff) made it almost impossible to finish any projects, including the ones in Warren County,” Hall said.

The Mississippi State Senate Thursday had passed a bill to extend the provision that allows the Mississippi Department of Transportation to use a portion of the gambling tax in counties with casinos to build roads, but some lawmakers are at odds over the bill.

Under the program approved in 1994, 2 cents of every 8 cents the state collects in gambling taxes goes to the MDOT for road projects in counties with casinos. The combined projects along the Mississippi Gulf Coast and Mississippi River total about $1.5 billion, Hall said.

However, the tax generates only $36 million a year, not nearly enough to cover all the projects on MDOT’s wish list. The department, in turn, has borrowed money against future gambling taxes to keep the program on schedule.

Projects in Warren County include widening Interstate 20, extending South Frontage Road and constructing a road to connect the harbor to U.S. 61 North near Bowie Road. Those projects have been delayed numerous times because of shortfalls in financing.

“We’ve got to get the port road,” Hall said. “With Nissan coming, that harbor can be a major economic development.”

Johnny Moss, chairman of the Warren County Port Commission, said the road is one of the top priorities for the commission that oversees the Vicksburg harbor because it could improve access.

“It’s important to industries already there and to industries looking to locate on the port,” Moss said.

Engineering work for the port road has already begun, and construction is scheduled to begin in 2004 at an estimated cost of $6.5 million.

“I can’t say exactly how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to get it moved up,” he said.

The proposed $930 million Nissan assembly plant in Madison County is expected to begin production in the summer of 2003.

Construction projects are funded and managed by the MDOT for state-maintained roads, but lenders won’t offer 20-year financing, lawmakers say, when the income source is set to expire in 2012. The bill deletes the deadline and does not set a new one.

An amendment to the bill also adds two projects for the coast and sets priorities on projects. The new projects for the coast are set before Warren County project, including the port road.

Sen. Mike Chaney, R-Vicksburg, said he voted for the bill Thursday with some reservations.

“I couldn’t vote against it,” Chaney said. “Warren County will benefit from it” by repealing the deadline.

Although other projects are ahead of local roads now, funding has delayed construction throughout the state, and getting funding sooner could move everything along sooner, Hall said. But House Transportation Committee Chairman J.P. Compretta, D-Bay St. Louis, said he has “second thoughts” about the proposal to remove the 2012 deadline.

Several companion bills have perished in the House Ways and Means Committee.

Debt service is already significantly cutting into the casino county road taxes, and Compretta is concerned that allowing MDOT to borrow more money would perpetuate the problem.

Bobby Moseley, director of MDOT’s office of administrative services, said that by the time MDOT sells a total of $325 million in bonds next year, debt payments will be so high that only an estimated $5 million in casino taxes will be available each year for road construction.

Sen. Hob Bryan, D-Amory, said removing the 2012 deadline would amount to loosening the reins on an agency that has repeatedly reneged on pledges to build north-south connectors on the coast. Extending the existing deadline could give MDOT a license to wait 20 years to build the connector roads, he said.

Even with the sell of 20-year bonds, MDOT’s Moseley said that realistically, the construction of connector roads on the coast would not begin until more revenues are found or money is made available from the state’s 1987 four-lane highway program.

Under that program, MDOT plans to widen Mississippi Highway 27 from Crystal Springs to Vicksburg. The 38-mile construction of a four-lane divided highway is scheduled to start in 2008 and will cost $95 million.

The last phase in the project, a plan to separate school and highway traffic along Mississippi 27 between Beechwood Elementary and Warren Central High School, is scheduled to begin in 2009 and cost $6 million.

Bryan said giving MDOT more financing leeway now, just as pressure has been mounting for management changes there, would reward a pattern of delays and excuses.

“If there’s any group of people who do not want more of the same from the highway department, you would think it would be residents of the Mississippi Gulf Coast,” Bryan said.

Sen. Billy Hewes, R-Gulfport, said the bill, even with its problems, is a must-have for the coast.

“In the absence of any readily available funding source, even though this one is highly inadequate, we have to look at it as a point to start from,” Hewes said.