photo by: Elvyn Jones

A motorist turns off Kansas Highway 10 at the Kasold Drive intersection during an afternoon rush hour on July 10, 2018. The section of K-10 west of U.S. Highway 59 to Wakarusa Drive has become the busiest section of the still two-lane K-10 west leg since the four-lane east leg opened in November 2016.

A public hearing next month has turned into a high-stakes affair for local leaders who don’t want to see one of Lawrence’s busiest highways turn into a toll road.

County commissioners last week heard that state officials are considering making the South Lawrence Trafficway a toll road to help pay for a potential project to expand the western leg of the SLT to four lanes.

Douglas County Commission Chair Nancy Thellman said a delegation of city and county officials will testify at a public hearing of the state’s Joint Legislative Transportation Vision Task Force on Nov. 8 in Olathe.

County officials already have expressed concern about making the SLT — which takes travelers from Interstate 70 northwest of Lawrence to Kansas Highway 10 east of Lawrence — a toll road. Commissioners spoke against the idea at last week’s meeting.

“I don’t want to see Lawrence end up served by two toll roads,” County Commissioner Mike Gaughan said at the meeting, referencing the Kansas Turnpike, which goes along Lawrence’s northern border.

In talking with a leader of the state’s transportation task force and reviewing past meeting minutes of that group, it is clear that tolls are a serious option the state will consider to help pay for roadway expansions in the future.

A Kansas Department of Transportation official and Kansas Turnpike Authority CEO Steve Hewitt testified on the possible use of tolls to the task force at its Sept. 20 public hearing in Pittsburg. They said a joint KDOT and KTA 2008 study identified K-10 and other sections of two-lane highway on which tolling could provide revenue for four-lane expansion.

Chris Herrick, KDOT fiscal and asset manager, testified that the proposed toll on those sections would be 15 cents per mile for passenger vehicles, rather than the 6 cents per mile charged on the Kansas Turnpike. That would not, however, cover all the expense of expanding highways to four lanes or maintenance, he said.

There is a national trend of using tolls to pay for 25 percent of a road project’s expansion and maintenance, Hewitt testified.

At 15 cents a mile, a toll to travel about 15 miles from one end of the SLT to the other would be approximately $2.25.

Seeking funding

The task force is considering tolls because it is seeking multiple streams of funding to replace the state’s current 10-year T-Works transportation plan that will end in 2020.

State Rep. Richard Proehl, R-Parsons, said the 35-member task force he co-chairs with Sen. Carolyn McGinn, R-Sedgwick, has conducted public hearings across the state since August on the needs and funding for the state’s next transportation plan. It would make recommendations on what should be included in the plan and how it should be funded to the Kansas Legislature in late January, he said.

Proehl would not estimate how much funding the Legislature might have available for a new transportation plan, but said the task force has learned from two months of public hearings around the state that there was no shortage of needs. Those needs start with T-Works projects planned but left undone.

“And we have to consider the 21 projects deferred in the current plan,” he said.

Starting in the hole

The task force received a summary of those 21 T-Works projects and the status of current KDOT funding from KDOT officials in its first public hearing in August. Catherine Patrick, KDOT state traffic engineer, states in a report presented to the task force that the cost of those 21 deferred projects with inflation would be $600 million. She further estimated at $3 billion the cost of a transportation plan that completed the 21 deferred projects and funded emerging needs like the K-10 west leg.

The 21 T-Works projects were deferred because of transfers of revenue from the 0.4-cent state sales tax receipts that is earmarked for KDOT to the state general fund. In 2010, it was assumed those transfers would average about $105 million annually for the next 10 years, Herrick wrote in a report to the task force. Instead, transfers totaled $264 million in 2014, $425 million in 2015 and more than $500 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

Herrick wrote that the 21 T-Works deferred projects could only be completed with a reduction in transfers, an increase in KDOT’s traditional bonding cap of 18 percent of its annual revenue, the creation of additional revenue sources or a combination of those strategies.

Environmental impact study

Meanwhile, the Kansas Department of Transportation announced in September it would start an environmental impact study on the west leg as a needed step in the expansion of that section of highway to four lanes. Aaron Frits, KDOT west leg project manager, told Douglas County commissioners last Thursday that the study would take three years.

The environmental impact study is separate from the legislative task force’s review, and it doesn’t guarantee the K-10 west leg would be included in the next transportation plan, Frits told the County Commission. The study does indicate KDOT recognizes the K-10 project as one of the state’s emerging transportation needs.

Frits also told commissioners that, although the updated environmental impact study would focus on the west leg, it also will update the previous environmental impact study for the whole South Lawrence Trafficway route from East 23rd Street to North 1800 Road. The entire SLT route would be studied, in part, because tolls on the K-10 portion in Lawrence were being considered as a funding option for the west leg improvements, he said.

Frits and KDOT spokeswoman Laurie Arellano emphasized that there has been no decision to toll the SLT, but that KDOT is obligated to study and plan for the possibility during the environmental impact study because an SLT with toll booths would have a different design than a free-access highway.

Arellano further clarified that the SLT from East 23rd Street to North 1800 Road/U.S. 40 was the only section of K-10 being considered for tolls. The K-10 corridor from east Lawrence to Johnson County would not be studied for tolls.

KDOT will have an informational meeting on the K-10 west leg environmental impact study from 5 to 7 p.m. Nov. 14 at Lawrence Southwest Middle School, 2511 Inverness Drive.