Nye County submits most critical road projects to state

At the request of the Nevada Department of Transportation, Nye County commissioners identified the most critical road projects in Pahrump that will compete for funding with other projects around the state.

One of the projects that submitted to NDOT during the workshop on Wednesday was not to allow left turns at the intersection of Oxbow Avenue, East Wilson Road and Highway 160. As part of the Nye County 2017 Work Program, NDOT had proposed a traffic light or “other form of improvement” at the intersection.

Another project that was submitted was for a right turn lane at the intersection of Highway 160 southbound and Highway 372.

Coy Peacock, assistant chief of program development in Southern Nevada, said the projects submitted by Nye County will compete with all of the projects throughout the state for the Statewide Transportation Improvement Plan funding, or STIP.

STIP is the instrument that is used by the state to implement the plans resulting from the statewide transportation planning process, according to the NDOT’s website.

STIP is the federally required, four-year transportation program that includes a fiscally constrained list of all federally funded and regionally significant projects.

“Most of these are safety issues, that’s the reason that we need to have those put in place, and we have a $22 million safety fund that we utilize to do these projects, and the governor has directed us to add $10 million statewide, so we’ve got about $32 million statewide,” Peacock said.

The selected projects will be entered into a needs list and will go through a long-range plan before officials determine whether they’re going to be funded in a five-year plan, he added.

NDOT officials have been traveling across Nevada and asking all of the state’s counties to identify their top two road projects that could be put into the work program.

“We are going to evaluate that against all of the other priorities. Each county had two priorities and we have other obligations, other issues that we have to deal with as far as roadways or safety projects,” Peacock said.

NDOT will compare the submitted projects on the list, traffic numbers, fatalities and crashes.

“All of those types of things are taken into consideration on how a project moves up the list to be able to be funded,” Peacock said. “But it’s possible that one or even two of these projects could show up on our work program next year. And our work program is what we show in the back.”

Peacock said the competition among the projects is “stiff.”

“They’ve already identified the projects that they are going to do next year. Not that that can’t be re-evaluated and other projects moved up, but there’s gotta be at least 20 to 30 projects, if not more, just for fiscal year ‘17,” Peacock said.

NDOT officials said the Wednesday workshop in Pahrump was NDOT’s last stop across the state. The agency will evaluate all of the submitted projects after that.

Contact reporter Daria Sokolova at dsokolova@pvtimes.com. On Twitter: @dariasokolova77