Direct role-players in Mississippi’s continuing conversations about new and improved highways – the governor, the Legislature, and the Transportation Commission/Department of Transportation – say similar things separately about construction, but intentional conversations with one another are few and far between.

A fourth, important indirect player – civic leadership – hasn’t asserted itself convincingly enough to effectively get the attention of the other three.

Until all four begin talking seriously together about highways, especially the unfulfilled Vision 21 mandate passed in 2002, little substantial and prolonged progress can be expected.

Last week, in Daily Journal conversations with three leaders at the top of any consideration of highways issues – Gov. Barbour, Northern District Transportation Commissioner Bill Minor, and House Transportation Chairman Warner McBride – all the discussion eventually came to funding and its inadequacy under current formulas and allocations.

Vision 21, an extension of the successful 1987 Highway Program that has built more than 1,000 miles of four-lane highways statewide, gets $200 million per year. Building four-lane highways today costs between $10 million and $15 million per mile, compared to a top figure of $4 million per mile under the 1987 program. A recent legislative examination of Vision 21’s 1,277 miles calculated completion in 108 years at the $200 million annual pace.

Setting aside the commission’s and MDOT’s proven veering away from statewide prioritization required in the Vision 21 act until November 2008, even following strictest legislative intent won’t build highways at an adequate rate.

Adequate funding for timely completion of Vision 21 must come from a reinvigorated consensus of the same magnitude that drove enactment in 1987 over Gov. Bill Allain’s veto.

The GetSMART (Start Mississippi’s Approved Roads Today) highway advocacy group that originated within the Commission on the Future of Northeast Mississippi has laid out strong ideas for discussion, but enthusiasm has not been mutual in the Legislature, in the governor’s office, and in the commission and MDOT.

While Barbour would not necessarily agree with everything a surging statewide advocacy group might bring to the table, in the momentum and political cover provided by outspoken support of civic leadership he probably would find considerable common ground. Both understand the connection between highway priorities and jobs growth and economic development.

Barbour seeks increasing direct and intentional conversations between MDOT and the Mississippi Development Authority, and he wants discussion of “user fees” and other sources of new revenue not usually called taxes. Barbour also clearly likes the idea of open discussion about public-private partnerships and toll-road funding beyond the expressway linking downtown Jackson with the city’s airport in Rankin County.

We agree with the governor: Jobs creation and economic expansion need a more defined and stronger role in highway construction. GetSMART has proposed a large fund under MDA’s control to meet immediate economic development highway needs, an idea Minor says he can support.

McBride and Minor both seek a citizens’ support group as strong, vocal and united as the AHEAD program that built support for the 1987 program.

Legislative advocates – principally then-Reps. Billy McCoy of Booneville and John David Pennebaker of New Albany, co-chair and chair of the House Highways Committee at the time – embraced the momentum and translated it into a passable program that overcame Allain’s veto. Minor, then a state senator, was a strong supporter of the 1987 program, and he was a conferee on the Vision 21 plan in 2002 as chairman of Senate Transportation.

McCoy is speaker of the House; Pennebaker is retired from the Legislature.

New trench warriors are necessary.

Action about new highways within Mississippi probably won’t be fully handled until the 2010 session. Backers hope the economy improves, and strategically, some of what Mississippi does will be determined by a new federal highway program, due for enactment this year, but not likely until 2010. There’s time yet to develop consensus.

It won’t be painless, but it will be beneficial. In Commissioner Minor’s words: “Nobody will be happy; nobody will be unhappy.”

Talk about highways never stops, but it must be productive and focused to achieve results.