Hiring an engineering and design firm to tackle the job of transforming Interstate 20 through Vicksburg won’t take but a month or so, though longer-term goals of Mississippi highway officials to put road maintenance on stronger footing remain as distant as ever.
Tuesday, Mississippi Department of Transportation commissioners voted to advertise for a design engineer for the long-discussed I-20 plan. Once hired, a firm is expected to take a year before construction crews have an official design from which to work, central district commissioner Dick Hall said. Most major construction work itself remains years away, like many large-scale projects nationwide, due to the upside-down federal Highway Trust Fund.
“Then whenever Congress comes around to redoing the highway trust fund, we’ll start to do it,” Hall said of the project’s construction phase, itself a contentious issue through the years with businesses along the interstate.
MDOT has said it needs about $400 million annually to prevent Mississippi’s roads from worsening from current conditions. Lawmakers have resisted calls to raise taxes to finance road upkeep. That includes the gasoline tax, which been a flat 18 cents a gallon since 1987 and hasn’t been indexed for inflation, which Hall has said is a hindrance to kick-starting highway work statewide.
“I don’t predict anything from them this year,” Hall said. “They keep saying next year, next year. Well, this is the year to do it, since gasoline has gone down. If they wait, it might be $1 (per gallon) next year, it might be back to $3.”
Average prices of a gallon of gasoline in Mississippi settled at $1.92 to end the week, more than $1 less than a year ago, according to AAA. Prices in Vicksburg have dropped to as low as $1.89 at some stations, down about 25 cents a gallon since year’s end.
State Sen. Briggs Hopson, who last year put completion of the South Frontage Road extension into this year’s transportation budget along with about $40 million in other projects statewide, didn’t hold out much hope, either.
“I don’t think we’re going to do anything on the gas tax,” Hopson said. “I know Mississippi Economic Council and other groups have been pushing the topic. Hopefully, it’s something we do next year.”
Nationally, the gasoline tax is 18.4 cents and the diesel tax is 24.4 cents. Each was last increased in 1993. Fuel taxes bring in about $34 billion a year to the trust fund, but the government spends about $50 billion a year. The trust fund has been the primary source of transportation aid to states for more than 60 years.
A fee involving the metering of vehicles to measure actual usage has been floated as a possible solution, though only Oregon has gone so far as to do a pilot program with the concept.

Timeline of the highway system in the U.S.•

• 1916 — The Federal Aid Road Act is passed, which provided $75 million over five years to match the states’ money for building and improving highways. The policy faded with the onset of U.S. involvement in World War I.
• 1913 — The Lincoln Highway, the first transcontinental highway for automobiles across the U.S., is formally dedicated. It runs from Lincoln Park, in San Francisco, to Times Square in New York City, a distance of 3,389 miles.
• 1921 — Another attempt begins to match state money for road construction and improvement. The Federal Aid Highway Act allocated the same amount of money as the effort five years earlier. It develops along the lines of national defense, as the Bureau of Public Roads consults with the Army to come up with a list of roads considered vital for that purpose. A year later, Gen. John J. Pershing compiled a map consisting of 20,000 miles of connected primary highways to jumpstart the process.
• 1926 — The U.S. Numbered Highways system is designated. Consisting of roughly 75,000 miles of highway, the system is approved by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials with a system that introduced even-numbered east-west routes and odd-numbered north-south routes.
• 1956 — The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorizes funding of the interstate highway system as known today. Signing the bill is President Dwight Eisenhower, who championed the interstate system as a crucial ground transport route for military supplies and troops in case of an emergency.
Established by the act was the Highway Trust Fund, which prescribed a 3-cent tax on a gallon of fuel. The tax has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993.
• 1972-73 — Key segments of interstates 20 and 55 are completed in Mississippi. Connecting drivers along 20 to parts on either side of the Mississippi River is the I-20 bridge, which over time replaced the old U.S. 80 bridge as the primary route across the river by ground. The latter was closed to vehicular traffic in 1998 over safety concerns.
 • 1974-87 — A maximum speed limit of 55 mph was in effect for any highway in the U.S. The blanket limit has since been dropped; speeds up to 80 mph have been put in place at certain places.
• 1993 — Commemorative signs are introduced renaming the system the Eisenhower Interstate System. Five stars at the top of signs stand for his rank as General of the Army in World War II.

 

“I don’t see how you’d do it and not have it be nationwide,” Hall said.
Locally, Warren County has more to work with in 2015 from the state, thanks to work that’s rolled over to this year.
Funds from the Office of State Aid Road Construction for the year total $1,838,073.72, according to an update in December to county engineers. That’s up by 29 percent over last year’s allocation.
Money from the state-supported entity, which assists counties in maintaining roads and bridges, may be used solely on infrastructure on “state aid” lists. It excludes more than 300 roads, mostly subdivision streets, maintained exclusively by the county.
County engineer John McKee updated supervisors on projects to start in some from in 2015 using pieces of the total allocation. The list includes widening Henry Lake Road, paving part of Old Highway 27, re-striping nearly 18 miles of six roads and squeezing in the first $117,000 of a plan to install a new motor on the Kings Point Ferry.
What could compete with those projects for dollars is replacing bridges at Fisher Ferry Road at the city limits and along Ballground Road.
“There’s a lot of erosion in that channel at Fisher Ferry,” McKee said, adding several feet of the bridge piers are visible where they shouldn’t be. “It’s scouring badly.”
Deficient bridges to be financed by the Local System Bridge Program include aging bridges at Avenue D, Wood Street and Baldwin Ferry roads. The program pays for replacing obsolete bridges not already maintained by cities. The Wood Street project was bid out to Central Asphalt earlier this month for $295,800.
The six roads to be re-striped in certain areas include part of U.S. 80 the county maintains — between Bovina and the Big Black River — two parts of Bovina Cutoff Road, Oak Ridge Road between Tucker and Ballground, Tiffintown Road near Lena Drive and Tucker Road between Freetown and Tiffintown.