At a joint legislative transportation committee meeting in late February, lawmakers got an earful from local government officials about the sorry condition of the state’s highways, roads and bridges.
The local officials hoped, at the time, to secure state funding for badly needed infrastructure projects in their areas.
In the months since, however, the state’s budget picture has clouded considerably due to the pandemic and related economic downturn, and the anticipated $500 million surplus that was going to help fund some of those projects is now a projected $1 billion deficit.
Though lawmakers and Gov. John Bel Edwards agreed on a plan Tuesday to plug much of the hole with federal relief funds, the aggressive approach from earlier this year to clear the more than $14 billion backlog of road and bridge projects is dead for now.
“At least in the short term, pretty much all of the infrastructure ideas that were being considered have just fallen away,” says Scott Kirkpatrick, executive director of CRISIS, a transportation infrastructure group.
That doesn’t mean projects already in the works with identified sources of funding are off the table, however. A new Capital Region bridge across the Mississippi River remains in the planning and a meeting is scheduled for early June at which a consultant will deliver a report recommending a site for the proposed span.
The widening of Interstate 10 through the center of Baton Rouge is also moving forward, even though only $400 million of the $1 billion or so needed for the project has been identified at this point.
Funding is also secure for a planned flyover ramp connecting La. 415 and La. 1 in West Baton Rouge Parish, according to Sen. Rick Ward, R-Plaquemine, who successfully carried the bill in the 2019 session that funded the project with BP oil spill dollars.
Ward and Kirkpatrick say the projects that won’t get funded were further down the list or didn’t have identified sources of funding and would have required weaning the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development off of the Transportation Trust Fund, which it uses to support its operating expenses.
“Those were all presupposing we would have a solid budget and there would be some extra money,” Kirkpatrick says. “There’s no extra money now and the outlook is questionable for the next few years.”
One potential bright spot is that Congress is expected to appropriate billions of dollars for infrastructure projects as part of a stimulus package later this year. But it’s far too soon to say what that might look like and which projects might be eligible for it.
“From a financial standpoint, I’m just really hoping there are some significant dollars that come with that,” Ward says. “Not only do we need it for new roads and bridges but it would create construction jobs. But it all depends on what it looks like and what kind of parameters they put on it. At this point, we can’t count on it.”
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