MDOT Faces Billions of Dollars in Backlogged Work

Transportation Officials from all across the Southeast are meeting this week in Biloxi to discuss how to address growing infrastructure needs in a time of declining budgets. MPB’s Phoebe Judge reports.

This year’s Southeastern Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials annual conference is taking place at a time when many states transportation departments are facing steep budget cuts due to the national recession. The Mississippi Department of Transportation, or MDOT, is one of the few states who have not had to make budget cuts so far this year. But MDOT chief engineer Melinda McGrath says funding is always an issue,

“You know we really do not have enough funding to get everything up to the level that we would like for it to be. So it is kind of a little bit of a shell gain, but we monitor it very very closely and we keep them open.”

MDOT is currently facing an $8 billion dollar backlog of work. Larry L. ‘Butch’ Brown, executive director of MDOT, says that backlog is making it harder for the department to keep an equal balance between building new infrastructure, like highways and bridges, and just keeping the existing infrastructure maintained,

“Every time we build something new we have to maintain it for the rest of it's life. So our maintenance costs are rising, certainly our new construction costs are rising and inflation is stealing our money. We are buying about 35% less than we were about eight years ago with the same amount of money. We are losing ground, but we are still taking care of our system and we are still able to build some new infrastructure.”

The Mississippi Department of Transportation will start to address some of those projects with $350 million dollars designated to the department in stimulus funds.