Leaders of the pro-highway-construction organization GetSMART plan a continuing attempt to get state leadership’s attention for their program to use existing state revenue for road construction to bond $500 million every other year and complete Vision 21 highways statewide.

GetSMART – Start Mississippi’s Approved Roads Today – organized itself in late 2007 with statewide civic leadership and some legislative participation. But so far it has received no full hearings from legislative committees of jurisdiction and apparently encountered closed minds within the Mississippi Department of Transportation’s highest leadership.

GetSMART Chairman Bill Renick, a former state senator from Ashland who works as a regional economic developer, said Thursday he believes concern about aging and dangerous bridges statewide could be folded into a GetSMART plan that would create a transportation bank. The bank would issue bonds against a fully committed $200 million revenue stream for a continuing, broad-spectrum construction program. Vision 21, a four-laning program passed in 2002, is funded at $200 million, but results statewide have been slow and minimal.

Renick suggests that the adversity of a national recession and an undisputed shortage of state funds is an ideal time for official and private-sector groups to set aside differences on particulars and work together for progress in achieving adequate funding.

The Mississippi Roadbuilders Association, for example, has made construction and reconstruction a higher priority. The group obviously represents the interests of engineers and contractors, but it also understands the escalating costs associated with delaying maintenance and new construction, a point repeatedly made by GetSMART leaders.

The roadbuilders association, citing independent research, says 25 percent of Mississippi’s 17,000 bridges are deficient: 4,201 bridges.

Further, Roadbuilders Chief Executive Mike Pepper wrote in a recent column that 17 percent of Mississippi roads are rated in poor condition and 23 percent rated in mediocre condition.

The goal is 75 percent of major roads in good condition, but Mississippi reaches only 42 percent in that category.

MDOT cannot meet the need of a highway program calculated at $12.5 billion between 2007 and 2016. The prospects for closing the gap between need and funding availability seem slim. We cannot afford to delay. It’s time for new thinking.

We hope our region’s leadership makes it voice heard, beginning today with MDOT Executive Butch Brown’s address to CDF’s First Friday 7 a.m. breakfast at the Mall at Barnes Crossing.