Editorial -- DOT Dragging Its Feet on Repairs

The Missouri Department of Transportation has been dragging its feet on making needed repairs. Supposedly, they were going to repave Route NN while 136 was closed. It turns out they only did two miles of a nine mile road. 

In another case of poor service, they told some people in Gentry County that they did one third of Route BB last Spring. It turns out they did six patches of repairs, nowhere near one third of Route BB. Not only that, they dragged their feet in replying to someone’s concerns about it. If we were to take that long to reply to people, we would be out of business.

Another case in point – Route 246 and E between Sheridan and Hopkins. It was recently repaved, yet it is already falling apart, with several holes on the road, looking like they had exploded.

After the 2021 gas tax increase passed the Missouri legislature, the federal government gave the DOT an unexpected windfall. DOT then turned around and used the tax increase to hand out pay raises to upper level management, including the Department Director, who already makes $220,000 a year, and over 30 other Jefferson City executives, who already make $100,000 a year. 

While we welcome the $53 million windfall to the area that was passed this year, along with the new gas tax revenues, it is obvious that the issues with our roads are bigger than just funding. There are fundamental changes that need to be made at the Missouri Department of Transportation. 

The Missouri Department of Transportation has apparently decided that we don’t matter here in Northwest Missouri. They have closed down local highway barns right and left over the last two decades, including the one at Sheridan back around 2010. They did so without any public input, comment, or notice; they just did it right in the middle of a bad winter. We didn’t find out about it until a month later, when one of our columnists reported it. The highway barn was one of the few sources of jobs and income for a town like ours. 

They can take all that money that they used to raise their upper and middle level management’s salaries and use it to reopen all the highway barns they closed in the area over the last 10 years. They can use it to hire workers for a living wage, so their partners could stay home and raise their kids, so they wouldn’t have to pay an arm and a leg for childcare. And they could spend some on projects like the Y east of Sheridan, where currently, you can’t see oncoming traffic when you merge 246 and 46. Then, they could earn back some of the trust they have lost over the years.