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U.S. 71's conversion to I-49 moving ahead
Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission Chairman Rudy Farber of Neosho reported Thursday that more than $80 million in projects to turn U.S. 71 into Interstate 49, including $15.7 million in Vernon County work, should be completed on schedule by the end of 2012.
"We still have a number of overpasses to be built and we're obviously doing a number of them now as you drive up and down 71," Farber said. "My goal when I went onto the commission was to improve transportation for the state of Missouri, not necessarily for this particular region.
"This 190-mile corridor from Pineville (in McDonald County at the state's far southwest tip) to Kansas City just happened to be one of those needing to be fixed."
Farber said the MHTC has garnered all the money it needs, to a maximum $90 million, with a limited amount of federal stimulus dollars and the rest in a dedicated fund built with gasoline and sales tax revenues.
He'd just been notified that U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood will attend a July 8 groundbreaking of a "Super Two" lane road project at Bella Vista, Ark., where Missouri's I-49 ambitions were bolstered with the failure of four-lane bypass funds to materialize for a Joplin to Fort Smith, Ark., interstate.
Farber has pledged to help Bella Vista with the bypass if any money is left over, which he said Thursday there is a chance of because highway builders' bids have been encouragingly low.
"I'm pleased the projects are coming along because as a young man, my parents' medical problems required me to go to Kansas City with some frequency," he said from Neosho, 75 miles south of Nevada.
"It was a hard 5 1/2-hour trip from here, but now it's a pretty easy 2 1/2-hour drive. So we have really made progress."
Missouri Department of Transportation Project Manager Sean Matlock of Joplin said Vernon County contractor Dave Kolb Grading of St. Charles was slowed by the wet spring but has been making up for lost time. "Trying to keep people on the county roads was difficult at times," Matlock said Thurday.
"We have the abutments in at Route D and might be ready to set the girders within the month, working from north to south. We've been using a stoplight north of Nevada at night, when the traffic is not so heavy, to haul materials from one side of the road to another."
Since early February, he said, Kolb has been busy on interchanges at Route DD south of Milo, Route E at Milo, Route D south of Horton and M at Compton Junction. The firm also is putting up an overpass and eliminating the at-grade crossing between D and M at County Road 290.
Those five projects are respectively costing $3.9 million, $3.9 million, $3.1 million, $3.2 million and $1.6 million.
Similar tasks are underway north in Cass and Bates counties and south in Barton County, where Ampac-Missouri of Columbia and Brauer Excavating of Stockton have done interchanges at Routes DD and EE north of Lamar and at Highway 126 south of there.
Matlock said two railroad overpass bridges will be built south of TT on the county's north side and bids let in September to relocate a mile of TT south of its present route. "We'll also do some frontage road work south of Rich Hill," he said.