Oktibbeha County may have clearance to pave a portion of Longview Road while awaiting federal money to complete the entire project, according to County Engineer Clyde Pritchard.
Pritchard, speaking during Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, told supervisors and frustrated citizens the Mississippi Office of State Aid Road Construction recently informed him it will allow Oktibbeha County to pave the ends of Longview Road with money that had been set aside for the project.
Now, Pritchard said, the county can pave the ends of Longview Road from Highway 25 to Bluefield Road or Horsley Lane and from Highway 12 to around the First Baptist Church of Longview. He said the permission is an unusual one.
“Traditionally, State Aid has not let us do that,” Pritchard said. “They like something to go end-to-end as y’all would like it to go end-to-end. But we have a new district engineer with State Aid and we have a new chief engineer with State Aid.
“He actually came down this weekend and drove the project,” he continued. “Kind of contrary to what they normally do, they’re going to allow us to develop a project within those ends with State Aid dollars. All that just happened within the last four or five days.”
With approval granted, Pritchard said the county will begin drawing up plans for the road work and determining exactly how much it can pave with the money it has. He said the county has $886,860 to use on the project, if supervisors don’t approve any additional funding, and advised the dozen or so residents who attended Monday’s meeting that money may not go far.
“That sounds like a whole lot of money to y’all, but when you’re building to the standards that we have to build, it doesn’t go a long way,” he said. “It will likely be that this board will have to contribute additional dollars to do it. We don’t know that yet, but it could be.”
Longview Road has been a target for paving for many 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.
‘Project won’t die on the vine’
Peggy Rogers, a resident on Longview Road who also runs a bed and breakfast on the road, pushed supervisors to complete the project, even if that meant paving the road without it meeting State Aid’s specifications.
“You can do this road without doing it to State Aid standards,” she said. “I’m not saying the whole road. I’m saying give people some relief.”
However, District 1 Supervisor John Montgomery, who shares responsibility for the road with District 4 Supervisor Bricklee Miller, said the county couldn’t pave the rest of the road. He said it doesn’t have the money, even if it wanted to, and it can’t risk losing state and federal funding to complete the project.
“I’m sorry, I’m not going to do that road not up to specs to lose our state aid, to lose that project and to lose our federal match for it,” Montgomery said. “That would be harmful to everyone in the county.”
During the meeting, supervisors again de-obligated the money from the previous project with a request from the Office of State Aid, in order to re-obligate it for the new project. Pritchard, at a question from Montgomery, said the Office of State Aid informed him that doing the partial project should not have any bearing on the county’s positioning to get federal funding for the complete project.
Montgomery, speaking to The Dispatch after the meeting, said that was important to him.
“If doing this project would jeopardize the current project, then I wouldn’t be for it,” Montgomery said. “All along, the State Aid engineer who’s been in there and just retired never would’ve entertained doing part of a project. If we would have done that $886,000 worth of work on the road for Longview Road, then the project we had in place that was going to give us our 80 percent would have gone away.”
Miller said she felt the partial project is at least a step in the right direction.
“We weren’t sure that this was even an option, so I’m excited that it is,” Miller said. “If you look when you come off of Highway 25, the heaviest populated area would be in that first area we’re looking at paving, so that will give great relief to those residents. Coming from Highway 12 and to come past the church would fix that part of the road that needs to be fixed.”
Rogers told the Dispatch that, while she and other residents would like to see more work done on the road, the planned work is a good start.
“Of course you want the entire road paved,” she said. “But if they’re going to piecemeal it, we appreciate that as well.
“We’re going to continue to work on this project,” she said. “It’s not going to be a project that’s going to die on the vine.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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