The long-delayed Longview Road paving project is a step closer to becoming reality after county supervisors approved a board order for it Monday evening.
County Engineer Clyde Pritchard, who updated supervisors on the project’s status, said the county can pave about two miles combined from the east and west ends of Longview Road. He said that will let the paved section extend on the west side from Highway 12 to a bridge over Talking Warrior Creek, and on the east side from Highway 25 to about 1,000 feet past Horsely Lane.
Pritchard said the Office of State Aid has allowed the county to move ahead with a partial paving of the road, which is an unusual permission.
“We’ve actually got State Aid to say, ‘Hey we agree with what y’all are trying to do,'” Pritchard said. “If our numbers come in good, if our bids are good, we’ll extend it a little further if we can.”
Oktibbeha County has allocated about $1.8 million for the project, split between $886,000 in State Aid money, $255,000 in county money and $750,000 in BP oil spill settlement money the State Legislature recently approved for the project.
Pritchard said the road was initially supposed to be 33 feet wide, with a safety shoulder, when it was going to be federally funded. However, he said the county can’t afford to build a road that wide, and the Office of State Aid allowed the county to move ahead with a 22-foot-wide chip seal county road without jeopardizing future federal funding. He said the road will include drainage suitable for if the project gets federal funding and is widened in the future.
“If the federal dollars become available, we’ve already got the drains in place,” Pritchard said. “We don’t have to deconstruct anything we’ve done right now. We’ll come back on top of that with an asphalt overlay, widen it out and we’re good to go.”
District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery, who shares jurisdiction of the road with District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller, said he was pleased to see the project could go ahead without jeopardizing future work.
“That’s the beauty of this,” he said. “When we started this, I didn’t want to start with something we’d put down and have to pull up. That’s something you’d have to, in essence, tear up and cost you that much more.”
Supervisors approved the board order for the project 4-0, with District 3’s Marvell Howard absent from Monday’s meeting. With the approval, Pritchard said, the county can start work in the spring.
“If we execute this order tonight, we’ll bid this job in the spring,” Clyde said. “We’ll go to construction in the spring.”
Longview Road has been a target for paving for several years. Supervisors had intended to pave the road this term, and the project received approval from the Office of State Aid in July 2016. However, supervisors de-obligated the State Aid money in early June due to a lack of federal Surface Transportation Program funding, which was supposed to pay for 80 percent of the project.
Without that funding, the county lacked the monetary means to complete the entire roughly $5.4 million project.
The State Aid money also has to be used by the end of the current board term, which is Dec. 31, 2019, or the county will lose it.
Mixed reviews over issuing bonds to complete road
While supervisors discussed the project, Board President Orlando Trainer suggested the county issue bonds to pave the rest of the road. Pritchard said the county is already paving the most expensive sections of Longview Road, and putting in chip seal on the rest of the road would cost about $600,000.
“We’ve got to put county money in it anyway, so we might as well just bring it all together,” Trainer said. “That would be my suggestion.”
However, Montgomery and Miller said they were satisfied with the work the county has planned for. Montgomery said he didn’t want to raise taxes to push for the completion of the road.
“We can’t keep running to the taxpayers and upping, upping, upping or we’re gonna run every business we have in this town off,” Montgomery said.
Miller, speaking after the meeting, said she’s happy to see the project finally moving forward.
“It’s wonderful that it actually is for sure moving forward,” she said. “We know now how far we can go with the allotted money that we have,” she said. “It’s very exciting that this is happening this way without us having to raise taxes.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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