Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
After two summers of road construction, Tekoa officials are talking about building another road.
It would be a truck bypass of Highway 27 for grain rigs and others to avoid the hill up and through Crosby Street, the main street through the Tekoa business section.
A bypass route would veer off at the north end of town, run level along Hangman Creek and connect at the south end of town before the bridge.
The idea picked up momentum in the past month, after Councilman Roy Schulz relayed a comment to his colleagues made 10 years ago by his wife’s uncle.
A meeting is now scheduled for next week, Aug. 14, when Steve Gorcester, Director of Transportation Safety Board, will come out and walk the path, which runs along a right-of-way once used by the Union Pacific Railroad.
The project sparked in July when Schulz called Whitman County Commissioner Greg Partch and asked for advice on how to make it work.
“We’re not going to buy this chunk of ground (from the railroad), we don’t have the money to buy it,” said Schulz. “It’s not us, it’s the Department of Transportation. The state would have to buy this and do it.”
Union Pacific tracks were pulled in the mid- 1980s.
Schulz said that grant money may be hard to get because there is no economic return per se to the project. Nonetheless, Schulz thinks it could generate more truck traffic through Tekoa, while removing disruption to Crosby Street.
“If I knew I didn’t have to make that hill, it could be the deciding factor to go that way or not,” said Schulz, who has driven a lot of grain trucks in his farming career. “It’s a pull. You gotta be in the right gear, because you can’t try to shift uphill. You could miss and take out a driveline or cause other assorted problems.”
As it is now, thousands of grain trucks travel Tekoa’s Crosby Street every year.
“Just ourselves, we come through Tekoa about 800 times a year,” said John Heaton, manager of Stateline Processors. He refers to 1,100 bushel-loads, or 105,000 pounds.
“A bypass would sure alleviate a lot of truck traffic, even if it was just one-way,” Heaton said. “The poor old ladies in town, they have to watch where they’re going.”
Steve Gorcester, director of the state’s Transportation Improvement Board, believes the proposal makes sense.
The TIB board grants funds for improvement projects to local entities.
“I haven’t looked at it specifically yet, but certainly from a transportation network standpoint, an alternate route there makes sense,” Gorchester said “The question I have been looking to get an answer to is what’s the scale of the project.”
Grants from the TIB normally can run between $250,000 and $500,000.
“If it’s a $1 million project you can see a way to get there,” said Gorcester. “But it’s pretty hard to do a $10 million project in a small town.”
Tekoa can still apply for a grant in this year’s TIB funding cycle. which has an application deadline of Aug. 24. The board awards grants once per year in November. Tekoa’s next chance to apply would be August 2013.
If the town applies and is not able to secure a grant for the entire cost of the project, they may later propose a combination of TIB funding and other dollars.
“What we don’t want is a bunch of partially-funded projects,” said Gorcester.
The first part of funding would be for a study, said Whitman County Commissioner Greg Partch, who has helped coordinate the project since that call from Schulz.
“It’s a natural, what they’re wanting to do,” said Partch. “But I’m not sure it’s something that TIB. can fund. I’ve got a couple different funding sources which we could fashion a reasonably good application to fund a study.”
One source Partch mentioned is the Freight Mobility Strategic Investment Board, a state agency that deals with large-scale freight, shipping channels and routes.
Partch said he believes more grain trucks will go through Tekoa when the new McCoy train loader opens next year between Oakesdale and Rosalia.
All tolled, the potential of building the truck bypass in Tekoa has come some distance since Shulz and his wife’s uncle, the late Dean Gumm, got to talking that day 10 years ago.
Gumm, who died last year, said they ought to make a truck bypass out of that old railroad right of way. It was an idea that had also crossed a few others’ minds.
“That’ll never happen,” said Schulz, as he recalls the conversation with Gumm.
Now, things are different.
“This all moved a lot faster than I was prepared for,” said Schulz. “But sometimes you gotta swing at stuff. It’s really a good idea. It’s just if it could happen.”
The Transportation Improvement Board oversees 320 agencies which are eligible for grants. These include cities, towns and counties.
The agency has $300 million dedicated to current projects, including, locally, a paving project in Malden, the Grand Avenue project in Pullman and Colton’s upcoming Rimrock Street improvement.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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