A group of about 15 local farmers and landowners showed up Monday at a public hearing held by the Sunflower County Board of Supervisors to help drive home the point that the large trucks that haul their harvest should not be restricted from travel on Airport Road.
The supervisors decided to table the issue and follow up on some of the suggested temporary solutions until they can meet with the state department of transportation officials to determine the feasibility of acquiring funds to upgrade Airport Road to handle the heavy loads.
During the discussion several suggestions were made including finding a suitable alternate route, issuing travel permits to in-county trucks only, radar-patrolling the area for speeders and scarifying a portion of the road, however that one was retracted.
The county lawmakers originally voted to impose the limit at their Aug. 6 meeting but later issued a moratorium on moving forth straight away to allow the farmers an opportunity to get their crops out.
But after a public outcry at the mention of it, they then decided to hold a public meeting to see what problems it would create and what suggestions the landowners had so they could arrive at an amicable solution.
Addressing the crowd, Attorney Johnny McWilliams said, “The problem has been that the road gets repaired and immediately it’s torn up again, so trucks are obviously a big cause of that.”
McWilliams added that when the road is repaired and heavy trucks are allowed on it regularly, the road tears up immediately.
“The road is not in good shape and it takes a lot of money to repair it,” he said.
McWilliams assured the landowners that the board is mindful of the farmers’ necessary use of the road.
“This board is cognizant that Sunflower County is an agricultural community and that a whole lot of our economy is based on farmers being able to harvest the crops and get them out, get them to grain elevators or wherever they’ve got to get to and utilize roads to do that,” he said.
Farmer Boyer Britt initiated the dialogue on behalf of the farmers by first calling for clarification on wording used in the public announcement that referred to “prohibiting the location and operation of through-trucks on specified roads.”
McWilliams explained that the inartful phrasing was his attempt to state that what they are trying to stop is the “wholesale use” of that road going from 448 to 82.
McWilliams then said, “Now, y’all may think that’s a bad idea.”
Britt injected, “I think it’s a terrible idea.”
McWilliams said that if a person is headquartered on Airport Road, they would obviously have use of the roadway. However, Britt argued that he didn’t see the difference in someone who is headquartered on Airport Road and someone who is not since the weight of the trucks and traffic would be the same.
Engineer Ron Cassada said, “The more truck traffic, the quicker it falls apart.”
He said when base repairs are done on the road the trucks cause it to fall apart within a year.
Britt contends that his probable use of Airport Road for harvest purposes amounts to about 17 percent for the year, 60 days out of 365, and he alluded to the poor condition of Airport Road being due to the county road department not properly maintaining that road and others.
Cassada then introduced calculations to the discussion noting that Airport Road is a state-aid road maintained by the county with state-aid funds.
With that in mind, the county has 150 miles of state-aid roads to maintain and are still getting the same $3.1 million, spread across four years, that it started getting years ago to maintain those roads.
Cassada said in recent years the county was only able to do approximately 40 miles of road maintenance, but now that amount is reduced to about 12 miles.
He said the costs have risen, but the funds remain the same.
It now costs around $98,000 per mile to do the cheapest base repair, whereas it could previously be completed for around $25,000 per mile.
Cassada surmised that in order to get Airport Road to a condition that it could handle the established 84,000 pound loads it would cost $2.5 to $3 million per mile. “And Airport Road is three miles long, we can’t do that,” he said.
However, Cassada said the county is in the process of doing some maintenance on 1.3 miles of that road for a cost of about $700,000 plus a 1.5-mile portion of Fisackerly Road. The total cost for both will be $1.68 million.
He declared that the new repairs will last a lot longer than the regular base repairs.
If they so choose, Cassada affirmed that the county has the right to allow only heavyweight traffic from the landowners and farmers who are home-based on the roads or have to go there and restrict all others or they can, “Let the road fall apart, continue to fix it,” he said.
Britt said that rerouting the large trucks via MS 448, a proposed alternate route, would not be a good idea because of the difficulty in making turns at the U.S. 82 intersection. Cassada agreed that the intersection posed a safety concern and he hopes that MDOT will fix it.
Mayor Steve Rosenthal and Indianola Alderman Gary Fratesi stated their trepidation over routing additional trucks down the U.S. 82 corridor and Rosenthal mentioned the safety concerns he has received regarding speeding trucks along Airport Road.
“As long as we can slow the trucks down, I don’t have a problem with them coming down that way,” he said.
Farmer Bill Baird’s concerns were with regard to new industries with aspirations of coming into the area and the effect the county’s decision to restrict heavy trucks could have on that.
“We all want Indianola to grow. We all want Indianola to do well and all of us that are represented here pay a lot of taxes, and we don’t want the taxes to go up either,” he said.
President Glenn Donald maintained that the board’s objective was to simply preserve the road and make all county roads safe.
He suggested searching for additional funding to make the roadway more conducive to heavy-truck traffic.
District 3 Supervisor Dennis Holmes explained that the issue arose because of the number of complaints he received regarding the poor condition of the road.
Holmes said based on the input he’s gotten from the farmers, it would be hard for him to make a recommendation to just shut it down.
“But we need to do something,” he said. “We can’t spend the money we’re spending on Airport Road or lack of money we’re spending on Airport Road every board term. It needs to be fixed.”
He said he plans to set up a meeting with transportation director Dick Hall.
The bottom line is that the county cannot afford to fix Airport Road the way that it needs to be done to accommodate the heavy loads.
“We need money,” said Cassada.
He encouraged the landowners to get with their legislators to push for a gas tax because the amount hasn’t been raised since 1987.
He also said that the additional amounts voted on by the legislators this year are not nearly enough.
And he reminded them that without an increase in the gas tax that a raise in the ad valorem tax was the only alternative and that affects the landowners most.
