Second Chambers County Transportation Plan meeting held
BY JOHN BRICE
THE LAFAYETTE SUN
CHAMBERS COUNTY — Local officials and community members gathered at the Huguley Fire Department on March 24 for a second public hearing regarding the Chambers County Commission’s new Five-Year Transportation Plan. Chambers County Commissioner for District 4 Samuel Bradford began the meeting by welcoming the attendees.
“Today we are going to hear a presentation by our engineering department about the Chambers County Commission’s Five-Year Plan,” he said. “Previously it had been a 10-Year Plan, but, on the wisdom of the highway department and others, they wanted a five-year plan. Also, [thank you to] Sheriff Nelson and all he does for the roads, [we want to] welcome him. Thanks to the Huguley Fire Department for allowing us to meet here. This is the second meeting in this plan, we met previously in LaFayette at the Chambers County Highway Department.”
Following the introduction, County Engineer Josh Harvill gave the presentation reviewing the recently completed 10-Year Transportation Plan and what the next steps are going forward with the new Five-Year Plan.
“The first and most important part is that this is just a proposed plan,” he said. “The commission has seen it. They have not voted on it. They have not made any decisions concerning it. This part of the process is the public hearing. We have had two work sessions where the commission got to get pieces of this proposed plan presented to them. Our next step that they wanted to take was taking that to the public to get feedback from the public.”
Harvill highlighted the points in the anticipated timeline for moving ahead with the new plan.
“[Eventually] we were going to take it to the legislative delegation, hopefully get you all out on a couple of the sites that we believe are critical going forward,” he said. “We may not take you to all of the projects but just a couple of them. We did a road trip on our last plan, that worked out real well, just getting you all together and hearing your feedback and letting you hear what our issues are. That would be done, obviously, after the session, and then we would go to adopt it. Our plan is to try to adopt the plan prior to our next budget planning year which usually begins at the end of June.”
Harvill said it is important to review the success and progress from the previous plan, then move forward to developing the new one.
“This first part of the plan is just really talking where we have been, what our previous plan was and [giving] a little bit of history on that,” he said. “I will talk to you a little bit about our revenue and how we are funded at the highway department. Then talking about our goal and our vision for the next five years. Then we will dive in on how we have identified our projects and what we are looking at prioritizing for the next years.’
Working to find a comprehensive vision, Harvill said looking at priority spaces and roads for work is important when creating the five-year plan.
“What we did with our previous plan is we had some goals, we had a vision,” he said. “We set this vision statement up. A lot of this has changed, but some of the principles will still stay the same. We still believe that there are certain paved roads in our county that we can’t prioritize for resurfacing just because we can’t pave them all. There are some that are very, very rural. You are going to see some roads come up that if you are from the rural part of the county you may wonder ‘why in the world are they not paving this road?’ and I hope after we get through this discussion you will know at least why I am not proposing that to the commission to be prioritized.”
