Mississippi Department of Transportation Northern District Commissioner Mike Tagert said recent efforts to improve the state’s road infrastructure are important steps — but they can’t be the only ones.
Tagert, speaking to the Starkville Rotary Club during its weekly meeting Monday, went over several new funding sources the state Legislature put in place earlier this year to increase MDOT’s resources, including the creation of a state lottery and sports betting.
“While they are meaningful and they are helpful, they are not the silver bullet to our infrastructure problems in the state of Mississippi,” Tagert said. “We’ve got to make sure that we don’t assume that we’ve checked this box and feel we’ve fixed our problems because, unfortunately, we have not.”
The state lottery, created during the Legislature’s special session earlier in the fall, is expected to net about $80 million per year for infrastructure for the state’s roads, Tagert said. Sports betting, which took effect in August, may generate an additional $2 million to $5 million, but Tagert said it’s not clear how much or how consistently.
Together, those provisions could generate up to $85 million per year for the state’s roads, and Tagert added internet sales tax diversions the Legislature approved for city and county governments will send millions more to the local level.
However, Tagert said Mississippi has about $400 million in needed road work.
“It’s a step in the right direction, and we’re very positive about that, but it’s not the end-all solution to what we need in our state in order to make sure we’re competitive going forward,” he said.
Tagert said he hopes legislators consider raising Mississippi’s fuel tax, which at 18.4 cents is one of the lowest in the nation. That tax funds MDOT’s $960 million budget. However, he acknowledged that talk is often a controversial issue for the state.
“The gas tax represents a stable funding source for infrastructure in our state, both local and state,” he said. “It’s a dependable source of funding based on usage. There’s a reason most states rely on state and federal fuel tax for the crux of their maintenance program.”
However, because of the lack of funding, Tagert said MDOT has taken a position of maintaining Mississippi’s current roads, rather than building new ones.
“If you look around the state of Mississippi, unfortunately, you’ll see we are building very, very few new capacity roads around our state,” Tagert said. “If you see one, it’s probably attached to a secondary, alternative source of funding related to an industry location or federal funding. It’s not very popular, but I think it is the right thing to do, just to maintain the system that has been put in place first beyond building additional roads that would need additional dollars.”
Projects
Tagert spoke about several projects, including work along Highway 12 in Starkville. The two-phase project, which began in February 2017 on the west side of Starkville and has moved east, is nearly complete. The work has included repaving Highway 12 and installing medians along the middle of the road.
Tagert said he expects it will take another 30-60 days to adjust traffic light timing on the highway.
“We’ve got to recount all the turning movements now that the project is in place and tweak the signalization to make sure we optimize that,” he said. “If you come down Spring Street trying to hit (Highway 12), you’ve run into that. If you come down Jackson or Montgomery, you’re running into these signal problems where you only have a signal for a left turn for three or four cars. We’re recounting that as we speak to try to re-tweak that as much as possible.”
Overall, Tagert said he believes traffic flows along Highway 12 more smoothly than it did before.
He also said, in response to a Rotarian’s question about the medians, that MDOT will share data on accident rates on the highway when it has meaningful data to do so.
The medians along Highway 12 were included in an effort to reduce cross-traffic crashes along Highway 12. In 2016, before the project began, Tagert said Highway 12 had one of the worst crash rates of any commercial route north of Jackson.
“We know that the number of accidents have been dramatically decreased,” Tagert said. “But our data, and what we based the project on, was based on five years of data. We don’t feel comfortable talking about that until we have a comparable amount of time, statistically, to compare it to.”
Tagert also said MDOT is preparing to do an overlay project on Highway 182 West from the Highway 25 bypass to Highway 82.
MDOT is also in the early stages of preparing new traffic signals on Highway 182 at the intersection with East Lee Boulevard, by the Mississippi Highway Patrol Station, and at the intersection with Old Mayhew Road.
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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