Plans to fix U.S. 95 cut back

Major pieces of Idaho’s plan to widen and improve U.S. Highway 95 were left off a list of projects that state highway officials recommended for funding this week.

Although the state Transportation Board did propose spending $304 million on U.S. 95 upgrades near Worley and north of Coeur d’Alene, the board also suggested no immediate action on another $512 million in improvements on dangerous stretches of the highway. That will delay projects that former Gov. Dirk Kempthorne proposed nearly two years ago in his ambitious “Connecting Idaho” campaign.

The estimated cost of the North Idaho improvements, as well as projects on U.S. 30 in eastern Idaho and Interstate 84 near Boise, has risen to about $1.6 billion, up from about $1.2 billion last year. But rising construction costs forced the board to recommend fewer projects, totaling $998 million, in North Idaho and elsewhere. The improvements will be paid for by borrowing against federal funds that the state is to receive.

The Legislature will make final decisions on how to spend the money during the 2007 session.

“We may tell them that’s not acceptable,” said state Rep. Frank Henderson, R-Post Falls, a member of the Legislature’s joint budget committee. “All the legislators from North Idaho will be very aggressive to preserve the projects that have been promised for North Idaho.”

Parts of U.S. 95 in the north are among the deadliest stretches of road in the state, Henderson said. “We simply have to make it a safe transportation corridor.”

Transportation Board officials defended their choices.

“This investment will dramatically improve safety, reduce congestion and create jobs,” Chairman Frank Bruneel said in a statement following the board’s decision. “The plan addresses the most immediate needs on each of the corridors while keeping within the budget we have.”

The scaled-back funding plan calls for widening U.S. 95 to four lanes from Wyoming Avenue to Garwood – a two-mile stretch just north of Coeur d’Alene – and building a highway interchange at Lancaster Road. Those projects would be scheduled for 2008.

The board also proposed paying to widen the highway to four lanes along 6.7 miles in the Chilco area, between Coeur d’Alene and Athol, in 2010; and building another six miles of four-lane highway in the Athol area in 2011.

Highway officials also voted to buy land for a wider highway from Wyoming Avenue to Athol and in the Sagle area, in Bonner County.

The board recommended no funding for buying rights of way or for widening the highway from the Sagle area north to the Bonner-Boundary county line, a distance of about 14 miles. There also would be no road construction in Sagle itself, according to the board’s recommendations. These delayed projects would total nearly $500 million.

“We knew Garwood-to-Sagle would be a multiyear project and be broken into phases,” said state Sen. Shawn Keough, R-Sandpoint and co-chairman of the joint budget committee. “Now it’s going to be broken into many more phases. Is that depressing? Yes it is. I would say the debate is still open on that. What the board did (Wednesday) was a recommendation to the Legislature. This is step one in an ongoing discussion.”

For southern Kootenai County, the Transportation Board recommended spending $60.8 million to rebuild 4.2 miles of U.S. 95, making it a four-lane divided highway, from Worley north to the junction with state Highway 58.

That leaves $13.5 million in additional work there unfunded, including rebuilding the highway through Worley.

The cost of building materials, including asphalt, concrete and steel, has climbed dramatically, in part due to demand from the hurricane-stricken Gulf Coast. The cost for asphalt jumped 71 percent.

Meanwhile, Idaho’s credit-rating agencies and bond advisers told the state that based on lower future federal highway funding estimates, the state should only sell bonds worth up to $998 million to finance the project – the biggest in Idaho history – to preserve its A+ credit rating.

“We had to make some difficult tradeoffs and reduce the scope of the projects,” Bruneel said. “Soaring construction and land costs have limited what we can do. But we are still addressing the most important and needed elements of the projects.”

In May, the state sold $200 million in bonds to pay for the first part of the Connecting Idaho project. Under the plan, an additional $783 million in bonds are to be issued in allotments of about $200 million over the next four years.

Keough said legislators were concerned earlier this year that there would not be enough money to pay for all the proposed highway upgrades right away. She said she had worried that constituents would expect too much and end up being disappointed.

“Some of my fears have come to fruition, which is disappointing,” Keough said. “We knew we may not be able to do as much as we had hoped to do. Now people are starting to understand why the Legislature struggled with this issue.”

Still, nearly $1 billion in highway improvements is progress, she said.

“It appears that from the money on hand, we’ll still be moving forward with significant pieces of those projects that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do,” Keough said.

The state would not be able to afford those projects if it were to wait for the federal funding to come into the state on the usual schedule, she said. That’s the point of the program: Borrow now against future federal allocations, build at today’s prices and avoid even greater surges in construction costs, she said.

“We’re clearly in the middle of a new era in Idaho in financing of roads,” Keough said. “We’re still going to make progress, but clearly we’ve got a ways to go.”