County Engineer reviews transportation plan at public hearing
BY JOHN BRICE
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
CHAMBERS COUNTY — Local officials and members of the community gathered at the Highway Department in LaFayette for a public hearing regarding the Chambers County Commission’s Five-Year Transportation Plan on Tuesday, March 10. County Engineer Josh Harvill gave the presentation reviewing the recently completed 10-year transportation plan and the progress that has been made.
“I am going to start by telling you a little bit about what we have done over the last 10 years,” Harvill said. “Some of you may or may not be aware that we have had a 10-year plan that we have been working on and completed last year. [I will] give a summary of that, talk a little bit about funding and then I will get into how we developed a plan that we are proposing to the commission. I want to reiterate what I just said. This has not been adopted. The process that the commission embraced was [to] put this information together and introduce it to them through two different work sessions which we have already completed — then have two different public hearings, one here in LaFayette and one in the Huguley community.”
Harvill explained what some of the next steps forward will entail.
“Hopefully [we will] have an update or a meeting with our legislative delegation where we propose a modified road trip with them where we actually ride them out and tour some of these roads,” he said. “They are in session right now, so it is going to take a little bit for the session to end and to coordinate that. Once we have that coordinated, then it would go in front of the commission to be actually adopted. That is very similar to what we did with our 10-year plan.”
Harvill said when reflecting on the success of the 10-year plan, considering the aspects of transportation planning that have shifted will be important for creating the next plan.
“I would say that over the last 10 years a lot of things have changed legislatively, funding-wise, that have really shifted a lot of the things that we prioritized when we first sat down in 2014 and said ‘hey guys, we need a long term plan,’” he said. “This is what we came up with then, it served us well. I think that we did good over the last 10 years. A lot of this is going to change going forward.”
Harvill shared the results of the previous plan, showing the extent of what was accomplished in 10 years.
“These are the summary of the projects that we completed over the last ten years,” he said. “This is over 100 miles of road work, 62 miles of traditional resurfacing, 52 miles of reconstruction — basically taking a road back to what its base is and then repaving it. You all know that in our county there is a lot of roads that need that. We had some pavement preservation, we did six bridge replacements, we had three bridge rehabs and a lot of striping.”
Harvill emphasized the importance of safety in every decision that is made.
“Safety is a big priority for our commission,” he said. “We are in the middle of adopting a long term plan strictly focused on safety. We spend a lot of money on safety projects, but if you look at that percentage, a majority of that is grants. That is another reason that we prioritize that. There is a lot of money out there for safety, for good reason, you can’t spend enough money on saving people’s lives. There is a good process in place where we can usually bring in 80 to 90% of federal funds on our safety projects.”
There will be a second public hearing on the Five-Year Transportation Plan on March 24 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. CST at the Huguley Fire Department in Lanett.
