The Mississippi Department of Transportation has almost completed nearly five miles of paving along two entrances to the Columbus Air Force Base, thanks to amenable winter conditions.
Mike Tagert, commissioner for MDOT’s northern district, said the department has done about four miles of work along Highway 373, from its intersection with Highway 50 to the base’s southern entrance, and one mile along Highway 786 heading toward the base’s northern entrance. Work on the projects began in April.
MDOT has worked with its own crews on the two projects, Tagert said, and the cost of about $500,000 is lower than it would have been if the department contracted outside labor.
“We’re doing it internally with MDOT forces, and it is cheaper,” Tagert said. “We have paving crews, but we’re limited in how much we can pave internally due to expertise, equipment and other factors.”
Tagert noted, internal projects or not, the road work wouldn’t have happened without this year’s mild winter.
“This is a project that, under normal circumstances, we would not have been able to get to this year — fiscal or calendar,” Tagert said. “Normally we would have expended all of our resources in the budget to winter weather recovery.”
The projects are an example of how susceptible MDOT’s budget can be to the weather’s whims, Tagert said. MDOT prepares millions of dollars each year for winter weather — or hurricane season in the state’s southern reaches, Tagert noted — and warm weather allowed the department to use some of that money to focus on the two highways near the base.
“Just in the northeast corner of the state — not even the entire northern district — we start each and every year off by purchasing about $350,000-worth of salt alone, in anticipation of being prepared for winter weather,” Tagert said. “This year we had such a mild winter that we didn’t have to restock the salt, for example.”
The work is even more important as MDOT waits for legislators to set a budget for the approaching fiscal year. While legislators failed to set a budget during the regular session, they’re expected to approve one during a special session. Tagert said he’s expecting MDOT, like many other agencies, will face budget cuts, which limits the scope of projects it can carry out.
“We’ve taken significant cuts in the last few years like every state agency,” Tagert said. “While we do take those cuts, we try to maintain a basic level of preparation for any uncontrollable event that might happen. But, those cuts do affect the number of programmable projects like this that we can do in a given year.”
Alex Holloway was formerly a reporter with The Dispatch.
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