In Brief:
More than two decades after first drawing the project on a map, the Mississippi Department of Transportation broke ground earlier this month on an expansion of State Route 15 in Tippah County, near the state’s northern border with Tennessee.
Transportation planners say the $200 million Ripley Bypass project, which will expand about 10 miles of road from two lanes to four, will ease frequent congestion in the area. State leaders have framed it as an economic development project — a “massive investment [that] will help further solidify Mississippi as a transportation hub for the country,” according to Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves.
The project is finally underway thanks in part to a bump in highway funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021. Mississippi is receiving about $200 million more per year under the IIJA than it did in recent years, says Brad White, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation. That has made it possible for the state to start a handful of capacity-building projects — new roads, interchanges, and lane expansions — that have languished in planning documents for years.
The same is true around the country. The IIJA added $110 billion in new spending on roads and bridges over five years, on top of the $305 billion authorization for the previous five-year period. That money has kickstarted several road-building projects in states. Oklahoma has used IIJA funds to restart a stalled highway interchange project, for example. Texas is using IIJA funding to extend a portion of Interstate 14 between Austin and Waco. Minnesota has restarted an interchange reconstruction project near Duluth. Every highway construction project in the country is largely paid for with federal money, supercharged by the 2021 law.
In many cases, like the Ripley Bypass, transportation planners have waited years for additional funding to help build new roads as states have struggled to maintain funding for their existing transportation networks.
The Tippah County project was included in a 2002 state plan called Vision 21, which prioritized certain roads for lane expansions. But Mississippi has not had enough funding to carry out many of those projects. While the federal government covers the vast majority of the cost for highway projects, states still need to provide 10 percent themselves.
Mississippi’s transportation budget, like that of most other states, comes mostly from its gas tax. The funding model hasn’t been updated since 1987, White says, and the gas tax doesn’t provide enough revenue to do everything the state transportation department wants to do. Mississippi has the second-lowest gas tax in the country. The department has a backlog of maintenance projects stretching into the hundreds of millions of dollars, White says. That has made it difficult to prioritize new construction, even for projects that planners have wanted for decades.
“Ten to 12 years ago the decision was made to basically put a moratorium on these [capacity] projects,” White says.
The Mississippi road network is a $66 billion infrastructure asset, White says. The state transportation department budget — about $1.4 billion a year — is “not a lot to take big bites of the apple with.” In recent years, the state Legislature has allocated surplus funds totaling almost $1 billion to the department. Those are one-time funds, which White says the department can’t rely on for its yearly maintenance budget.
“We felt that the best use of one-time funding was construction,” White says.
According to an analysis from Transportation for America, a nonprofit advocacy group, states have used more than a quarter of the additional IIJA funding for projects that expand roads. State legislatures, especially those enjoying budget surpluses, have allocated additional funds to roadway expansion as well. And recent reporting suggests that state transportation departments are using other federal infrastructure programs, including those meant for climate mitigation, to fund highway expansions as well.
The boost in federal highway funding has drawn praise from state officials and transportation planners but angered climate activists and public transit advocates, who say doubling down on car infrastructure will make life worse in the decades to come.
The Biden administration initially tried to split the difference. While backing new highway funding, the Federal Highway Administration released a memo encouraging states to fix up existing roads before building new ones. The memo angered some state transportation departments, who felt the White House was trying to interfere with state transportation planning processes. But the memo was non-binding, and there’s little evidence that states changed course because of it.
In any case, inflation has likely reduced the number of new projects the bill could create. Construction costs have gone up almost 70 percent since the end of 2020.
“IIJA funding has enabled projects that might have been delayed due to financial constraints to continue progressing,” says Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. “However, due to inflation, the increased IIJA funding (except for discretionary grants) has essentially allowed states to build about the same number of projects as originally anticipated pre-IIJA.”
It creates a larger funding problem for states trying to maintain their infrastructure.
White has advocated for the Mississippi Legislature to increase recurring funding for the state Department of Transportation. There are ways to do it without raising taxes, he argues, like increasing the department’s share of other revenues from taxes on Internet sales and gaming. But in the long run there’s no way to keep up with maintenance — let alone keep building new roads — without more money.
“I think it’s been a shock to our legislative leaders to find out just how expensive these projects are,” White says. “I don’t think they recognize how short of a distance what they consider to be a lot of money will go.”
