By Brad Johnson
Register-Herald Reporter
BECKLEY — How would you raise millions of dollars to finance badly needed highway projects in West Virginia? And which projects would you choose to fund?
Those are the questions the state Department of Transportation asked Beckley area residents Thursday at an information workshop regarding the Statewide Multi-Modal Long Range Transportation Plan. It was the fifth of eight workshops being held around the state this month.
“We don’t have enough money,” Perry Keller, unit leader for urban and statewide planning for the DOT, said during the workshop at Woodrow Wilson High School. “That’s the story we’re trying to tell today, and if people agree with that based on what we’re presenting, then the idea is, how much money do we need and how should we raise those extra dollars?”
Those attending the workshop were offered a questionnaire to fill out and submit, indicating their preferences regarding how to raise additional funding and how those funds should be spent.
“Should we look at raising the gas tax, or raising some of our fee structures for licensing or registration?” Keller said. “Should we raise our use tax, the 5 percent tax you pay now when you buy an automobile? Should we look at areas that have high coal production, taking some severance tax to make sure we can maintain the roads that often have some maintenance issues based on that?”
The workshop featured a top 20 list of the state highway projects that rated the best in a benefits-cost analysis. Several local projects made the top 20, including the East Beckley Bypass-Stanaford to Ragland project, the East Beckley Bypass-Cranberry Creek to CR 8 project, the Coalfields Expressway-Mullens to Pine-ville project, and the King Coal Highway-Montcalm to W.Va. 123 Airport Road in Mercer County project.
“Nobody likes to see increased taxes, but we’re trying to make a case that we’re going to end up being a maintenance-only organization in the not-too-distant future, if our revenues don’t go up,” Keller said. “Or what we’re going to end up doing is not taking care of what we’ve got, and really creating a mess in the future.”
Judy Radford, executive director of the 4-C Economic Development, attended the meeting, hoping for information regarding how the influx of traffic created by the new National Scout Preserve coming to Fayette County will be handled.
“We’re going to have all these people coming in and we need to know what’s going on with this so we can fold it into all the other planning,” Radford said. “That’s going to be such a positive thing, but we need to be planning now.
“It’s encouraging to see that there are several projects among the top 20 that could potentially play into that Boy Scout project and getting people here for that,” she said. “Not all the projects are necessarily in this area, but they could be part of a sort of feeding system from outside and help the traffic flow a little better.”
Although the questionnaire listed several options including a soft drink tax as potential revenue raisers, Radford said, “I think it should be something that’s tied to transportation. There are several ideas here that could be used to raise some funds and I think we definitely need some. We need help instead of criticizing.”
Those who didn’t attend the workshop can submit comments at www.wvtransplan.com through May 15.
— E-mail: bjohnson@register-herald.com
