Evening rush hour traffic on Kansas Highway 10 on Thursday, Aug. 18, 2011.

Topeka ? Highway construction contractors and some state lawmakers expressed alarm this week at new estimates from the Kansas Department of Transportation that show how Gov. Sam Brownback’s budget plan would affect routine maintenance and repair projects in the state’s 10-year transportation program known as T-Works.

Kansas Secretary of Transportation Richard Carlson unveiled those numbers during a briefing before the Senate Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday.

It showed that in the upcoming fiscal year that begins July 1, only $28 million would be spent next year to resurface 235 miles of roadway, and only $16 million more would be spent on other kinds of preservation projects.

Meanwhile, more than half a billion dollars in general sales tax revenue would be swept out of the state’s highway fund in each of the next two years to shore up the state’s general fund.

“If you take it to the nth degree, that’s approximately touching a piece of pavement once every 50 years,” said Bob Totten of the Kansas Contractors Association. “The whole point of the highway program was to address about 12 to 15 percent of the needs every 10 years.”

According to charts that KDOT presented at the Ways and Means hearing, Kansas spent an average of $157 million a year resurfacing 1,436 miles of roadway during the first five years of the T-Works program, 2011 through 2015.

KDOT officials weren’t immediately able to say when the last time was that Kansas spent so little on highway maintenance. They did say, however, that Kansas roads are still in generally good shape, and the routine maintenance and preservation projects should return to a more normal pace by 2019.

“Roads on the Kansas system are among the best in the nation and they far exceed the agency’s performance targets,” KDOT spokesman Steve Swartz said. “KDOT leaders believe the agency will be able to continue to meet its performance targets for road conditions under the current budget proposals. Spending on preservation in 2019 is anticipated to increase to $245 million as current projects are paid off.”

That, however, would still be far below the average of $366 million a year the state spent on all types of preservation projects — resurfacing plus other maintenance — during the first five years of T-Works.

Among the preservation projects being delayed is a resurfacing project for a 19-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 56 in Johnson and Douglas counties. That project, estimated at about $2.8 million, was originally scheduled to be let out for bid in December 2016.

In addition to the reduced preservation projects, KDOT said it also planned to delay 10 modernization projects totaling $274 million, and 13 expansion projects totaling $252 million, that had been scheduled over the next two and a half years.

None of those projects is in Douglas County.

Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, who serves on the Ways and Means Committee, said he believes there were political considerations in deciding which projects to delay, noting that one of the projects still on the schedule is an expansion project on U.S. Highway 69 in Crawford County.

“Everybody knows that was done for political reasons to basically benefit (Sen.) Jake LaTurner’s re-election campaign down in southeast Kansas,” Hensley said.

LaTurner, a Pittsburg Republican, was thought to be in a tight re-election campaign last year against Democrat Lynn Grant. But the race turned out not to be as close as Democrats had hoped, and LaTurner won a second term, 56-44 percent.

LaTurner confirmed last year that he lobbied the Brownback administration not to delay or cancel that project because he considered it important to his district, adding that all lawmakers are allowed to lobby the governor for projects in their districts.

But Hensley said he’s also concerned that delaying the preservation projects will put the state behind schedule for years to come.

“It’s going to take us a long time to get back to where we would have been had the 2010 transportation plan been fully implemented,” he said. “It’s going to take us a number of years to be able to adequately fund the transportation plan as it passed in the 2010 session.”

The Kansas Contractors Association is part of a coalition known as Rise Up Kansas that has proposed, among other things, an 11 cent per gallon increase in motor fuel taxes to pump more money into the highway fund. But Totten admitted this week that an 11 cent increase is unlikely to pass the Legislature.

“It’s more realistic to see the Senate that’s talking about a 5 cent a gallon tax increase,” he said. “It doesn’t make enough money. We’d probably have to come up with some bonding. They’re not wanting to do that, but the hole is so gigantic for everybody. Roads are just part of it.”