The annually updated Arizona Department of Transportation five-year plan is a long document full of ambitious, big-ticket projects.
This year’s, signed off on by ADOT’s director on June 20, includes $4.5 billion worth of road work across the state through 2021, more than $400 million of which will go to projects in Pima County.
On tap for our area are continuations of work at the Ina Road-Interstate 10 intersection that will eventually take Ina up and over the interstate, which will be expanded to three lanes; improvements to the Ajo Way and Interstate 19 intersection; and similar work on Houghton Road, Kino Parkway, Ruthrauff Road and a few others.
New sidewalks, pavement preservation and nearly $80 million in improvements to the Tucson International Airport are also included.
Each project comes with a five-year timeline with funding allocated for different phases of the project, like design, scoping, acquiring rights of way and construction.
However, as hard and fast as the five-year plan may seem, it should not be taken as a fixed timeline for work, an ADOT spokeswoman told the Road Runner.
For example, in the 2016-2020 five-year plan, the plan set aside $50 million for construction of a traffic interchange at Country Club Road and I-10 in fiscal year 2020. However, in next year’s plan, that $50 million is nowhere to be seen: Not in FY 2020, nor FY 2021, though design, utility, and right-of-way work is still slated for funding.
The Houghton Road interchange had $25 million slated for construction in FY 2019 in last year’s plan, but this year that figure had climbed to $30 million and now comes a year later. Similar changes are seen in several other large local projects.
“While the (state transportation) board has adopted the five-year program, it could change,” ADOT spokeswoman Laura Douglas said. “The next five-year program, things could shift based on priorities or funding. It is a living document.”
But what is extremely unlikely to change, Douglas said, is those projects’ position in the high-priority pipeline that is the five-year plan, which serves as a “guide” and “blueprint.”
“Once they’re in the five-year program, they stay put,” she said, adding that there have been just “a few cases” where projects were taken out and put in the development, or six-to-10-year plan.
Projects in the development program have been identified as priority projects, but “funding is not available yet,” Douglas explained.
Getting into the five-year plan is a long, public process where the feedback of residents and the advocacy of so-called stakeholders plays a big part, she said.
One such project with potentially big impacts for Southern Arizona is improving State Route 189, which takes traffic from the expanded Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales to I-19. In that case, advocacy from the produce-import industry was eventually joined by support from political leaders across the state. After previously making it to the longer-term development plan, ADOT’s new five-year plan now includes $64 million for construction costs in FY 2021.
Increased commercial traffic, hauling maquiladora goods and billions of dollars in Mexican produce across what ADOT calls “one of the busiest land ports in the United States,” could have significant economic impacts well outside of Nogales.
Douglas said there were a few other projects that made the cut this year that, while located outside of county lines, will affect any county resident who regularly commutes between Tucson and Phoenix.
With a roughly $300 million infusion brought by the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, approved by Congress late last year, ADOT was able to bump four projects out of the development plan and into the five-year program. Two of those, at a cost of roughly $125 million, will make the I-10 stretch from Tucson to Casa Grande a continuous three-lane roadway.
As the plan stands now, one of those projects has construction costs planned for FY 2018, and the other for FY 2019. Who knows? With a little public pressure, might those projects be moved up a year?
