Maintenance a priority for Palouse regional five-year

Transportation officials from around the area gathered to pinpoint road project priorities for a five-year-plan at a meeting of the Palouse Regional Transportation Plan Organization (PRTPO), May 12.

A major focus should be the ongoing maintenance and preservation of existing Whitman County roads, said county public works director Mark Storey in a later interview.

COAST, Pullman public works director, Moscow city engineer, SWEDA officials, the mayor of Malden and two Whitman County commissioners were in attendance to give suggestions.

PRTPO, a quad-county, state-funded committee, was completing a four-county tour to get input for a 50-page regional plan to be added to the state’s five-year plan.

There are 19 RTPO regions in the state.

The point of this five-year-plan is for transportation officials to brainstorm their region’s biggest transportation needs, in order to have a better chance at state and federal funding for those projects when funds are available, Storey said.

The results of PRTPO’s meetings will be a five-year-plan for the Palouse region, a brochure and some space in the state’s official five-year transportation plan.

PRTPO shares a director with SWEDA and meets every other month for county engineers to keep their shared transportation routes working well.

This includes roads, rivers and rail. Garfield, Asotin, Columbia and Whitman County engineers attend these meetings.

Listed at the front of the room as trouble areas for the four counties were maintenance and preservation of existing roadways, freight and goods system, sub-standard railways, a by-pass of Pullman into Idaho, U.S. 12 through Clarkston, Fleshman way interchange on SR-129 south to Asotin and the Snake River.

Commissioner Greg Partch said a bypass for Pullman was definitely needed.

He added breaching the dams on the river would have a massive detrimental impact on roads in all four PRTPO counties.

The cracking, “alligator-ing” surface of the county-owned Pine City-Malden road was the reason Malden mayor’s Ted Maxwell attended. He and another citizen have been struggling to maintain that road, using store-bought pothole mix.

Storey suggested Maxwell look into obtaining a grant from the Transportation Improvement Board or other forms of state funding. He pointed out the state does not allow the county to spend money within city limits.

Storey added the state guidelines for the bridge widths are not keeping up with the rapidly expanding farming equipment which must move through the area. Farmers occasionally take out bridge rails to move combines through, he said.

“I’ve lost more bridge rails to chainsaws,” he said.

Storey said in a later interview he believed ongoing maintenance and preservation of existing roadways was just as a crucial, if not more so, than new projects.