By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A public comment period on proposed transportation spending in Missouri ends soon.
The Missouri Department of Transportation will take resident input through next Thursday, July 6th, for its plans over the next five years, what MoDOT calls the Statewide Transportation Improvement Program or, STIP, for short.
Northwest Missouri District Engineer Marty Liles advises residents who wish to comment to do some research first.
“I think the first thing that they need to do is they need to understand the vast asset as far as transportation and roadways and the funding that we have within the department,” Liles tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “I think it’s good for them to go online and look at the STIP.”
Click HERE for the MoDOT Statewide Transportation Improvement Program website.
MoDOT plans to spend $14 billion on all forms of transportation over the next five years, $10.5 billion on road and bridge construction. The Missouri legislature approved spending $100 million dollars on the so-called low volume, lettered routes throughout rural Missouri, the second year in a row the legislature has approved $100 million to improve badly deteriorating blacktops in rural Missouri.
Liles says the five-year plan will benefit greatly from the legislation injecting General Revenue funds toward the repair and resurfacing of those rural roads.
“With this funding that is proposed with the legislature for low-volume and minor roads, we’re able to get out there and focus additional money on these low-volume roads and resurface those again, too, because that’s been a big issue with a lot of our constituents out there in our region,” Liles says.
The STIP isn’t just about roads and bridges. It contains money for all modes of transportation in Missouri, including money to upgrade and improve railroad crossings. That issue came to the forefront a year ago with the fatal crash of an Amtrak passenger train at a rural crossing near Mendon, south of Brookfield. On June 27th of 2020, the Southwest Chief carrying 270 passengers and 12 crew crashed into a dump truck stuck on the tracks at what transportation officials call a rural passive railroad grade crossing. The train derailed. Three passengers died, several more suffered injuries. The truck driver died. Amtrak and BNSF Railway estimates the damages at $4 million, according to the National Transportation Safety Board investigation.
While a proposed expansion of Interstate 70 to three lanes between Kansas City and St. Louis gets most of the attention, the importance of this STIP, Liles says might just be how much money is focused on upgrading the transportation system Missouri has, taking care of the present system rather than building new.
“Well, I will say with this legislative session, we are very blessed, I guess, to see that we’ve got additional funding, General Revenue, coming in to take care of infrastructure, what we have, roads like the I-70 and the low-volume and minor roads that we just didn’t have the funding in our system to take care of those as well,” Liles says.
Missourians are invited to submit comments via email at [email protected]. You can also call customer service at 1-888-ASK-MoDOT (275-6636) or even go the old fashion route by dropping a letter to Transportation Planning, Program Comments, P.O. Box 270, Jefferson City, MO 65102.
MoDOT’s formal comment period ends July 6th.
Follow Brent on Twitter @GBrentKFEQ and @StJosephPost