A new program to steer more state money to city streets has been overwhelmed with requests, and the committee that administers it wants to take a pause to develop guidelines to help govern what projects receive funding in the future.
Requests totaling $28 million for 82 projects have been filed, but there is only about $14.5 million available - as projected through the end of the year. So, the State Aid Street Committee decided Thursday to award up to $250,000 each to projects that didn’t require design work. That covered 64 projects and amounted to $13,098,100, according to Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department calculations.
The situation is a turnaround from the committee’s first meeting in March when, relatively flush with cash and short on projects, it approved 11 projects worth $3.2 million. The Arkansas Highway Commission is to open bids on 10 of those projects next month.
Also Thursday, committee members voted to develop guidelines on which they hope to get public comment after their next quarterly meeting in September.
They also voted to require a city to post 2 percent of the estimated cost of a project to help guarantee that the city completes the project, and to require a city to submit its requests to the committee instead of to the Highway Department. The role of the department is to provide support for theprojects that the committee approves.
In all, the department has fielded about 160 project requests from cities, said David R. Mayo Jr., the state aid engineer for the agency. The department receives five to 10 project funding requests a week, down from 10 a day earlier in the year, he said.
Conway Mayor Tab Townsell, one of seven mayors who form the committee, expressed reluctance to the committee approving projects without first having “objective criteria.”
“We have no strategy,” he said. “That makes me extremely uncomfortable.”
But others on the committee didn’t want to go as far as Townsell proposed and not fund any more projects until the guidelines are in place, which would’ve put off any projects being awarded until next year.
Projects approved Thursday are to be awarded contracts in September. Repaving projects can’t be done in the late fall or winter because of cooler weather.
If the projects had to wait until the committee’s September meeting for approval, the earliest the contracts could have been awarded would have been February.
Another member of the committee, Camden Mayor Chris Claybaker, said too many cities have been looking forward to funding for their projects to not move forward when the money is available. “These are projects we all have been needing. This whole thing was a godsend for us,” he said.
Camden had proposed a $546,000 project to repave Maul Road and Adams Avenue, but the city will receive just $250,000 as a result of the committee’s action Thursday.
The committee was created late last fall after state voters approved a temporary half-percent sales tax that would be in place for 10 years to finance a $1.8 billion highway construction program focused on building four-lane highways and easing congestion on other routes.
Also, cities and countieswill share about $700 million in state turnback money over that 10 years.
The measure voters approved also included a provision creating a State Aid Street Program to be funded with 1 cent of the 21.7 centsa-gallon that the state already collects on gasoline. That penny will yield approximately $18 million annually.
The committee, by law, meets quarterly to consider project funding requests.
Thirty-four of the 64 projects approved Thursday fell at or below the $250,000 threshold. They ranged from $65,000 to repave parts of Second, Church and Davidson streets in the Desha County community of Reed to a $250,000 project to repave parts of Cherry, Bowles, Rankin, Choctaw and Braffield streets in Dumas.
A member of the committee, Jonesboro Mayor Harold Perrin, said city officials whose projects are more expensive than the $250,000 threshold would have to determine which ones are priorities for their communities.
He and Lamar Mayor Jerry Boen, who acted as committee chairman in place of Paragould Mayor Mike Gaskill, who was absent because of illness, also thought that cities should be required to submit more information about their projects, such as why the projects were needed and their economic impact. Perrin suggested that photographs of the streets at issue should be included with the applications.
“More knowledge of particular projects would be beneficial to this committee,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/14/2013