By Mary Catherine Brooks
CHARLESTON – A standing-room-only crowd packed into the governor’s conference room Monday as Wyoming and McDowell county officials and residents went head-to-head with state Transportation Secretary Paul Mattox over the lack of stimulus, or “job creation,” dollars for the area.
Mattox said state budget constraints were to blame for the lack of dollars for projects in the two counties, including the Coalfields Expressway.
The projects selected for the stimulus money could be completed with the federal funding, Mattox said, and were for “job creation.”
Mike Goode, chairman of the Wyoming County Economic Development Authority, asked why the road to a new federal prison complex in the McDowell County industrial park, which is expected to employ 330 people when it opens next spring, was not included. The only road into the complex now is a dirt road.
“Do you want that access road built?” Mattox replied sharply.
“I’m not getting smart with you,” Goode said. “But that’s jobs right there and there is no road to the prison.”
Mattox said an access road for the prison was scheduled to be bid in the spring.
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Construction of the Coalfields Expressway has begun in both Raleigh and McDowell counties, and will eventually traverse Wyoming County. The new road will be the first four-lane for both Wyoming and McDowell counties.
Mattox said roads now must be built in “useable sections,” which would cost about $40 million from the McDowell County industrial park, just across the Wyoming County border, into White Oak, near Pineville. The industrial park is the site of the new federal prison complex.
It will take another $100 million to bring the road from the only completed section in Raleigh County, near Slab Fork, to Mullens in Wyoming County, he said, and the state doesn’t have the money.
Federally earmarked dollars, doled out in $5 million increments, are not enough to build the Coalfields Expressway, Mattox said. Those increments will have to be allowed to accrue before more sections of the road are built, according to Mattox.
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It takes about $1 billion to maintain the roads in West Virginia and road funding is expected to “flatline” over the next dozen years, according to Mattox.
“We don’t raise revenue,” Mattox told the crowd, “we take what’s available.”
It would take a statewide 13 cent per gallon gas tax over the next five years to build the Coalfields Expressway.
It would take a 60 cent per gallon gas tax increase to build all the road projects planned in southern West Virginia, according to Mattox. Those projects include the Coalfields Expressway, King Coal Highway, New River Parkway, Shawnee Parkway, Z-Way in Beckley and W.Va. 10 in Logan County.
The federal highway funding bill expires this year, Mattox said, and state officials are now working on the projects that will get priority in the state’s next six-year plan. Wyoming County has yet to be included in those plans, according to state DOH officials.
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Residents complained after the meeting that Mattox missed the point; making road construction and maintenance in the two counties a priority is their biggest grievance with the current and state administrations.
“It is a history of neglect,” Jay Morgan of Lynco said.
Brad Toler of Clear Fork charged the state is benefiting from the natural gas, coal and other natural resources being trucked from the southern coalfields and the residents are seeing no return.
“Our roads should be paved in gold,” he said.
Morgan promised this meeting was only the first if the state continues to neglect southern West Virginia, in particular Wyoming and McDowell counties.
Sen. Richard Browning, D-Wyoming, led the meeting and said he hoped it would be the beginning of changes for the state’s two southernmost, and most economically disadvantaged, counties.
He said the road from Welch to Beckley has been discussed since the early 1960s and became a reality in 1988 when he and then-Delegate Rick Staton sponsored a resolution creating the Coalfields Expressway.
In 1991, a federal line item of $50 million kicked off the Coalfields Expressway funding.
Construction did not begin until 2000, however.
“It’s always been a grassroots effort,” Browning said. “It’s never been recognized as a viable need (by the state).
“(This road) is our only way of survival.”
