Funds For Franklin Road, Not Mack Hatcher, in New TDOT Plan

Governor Bill Haslam and TDOT commissioner John Schroer released on Friday their proposed plan of road projects to fund for the next three years.

The plan contains funding for 79 sites and another 15 state-wide; it costs roughly $2 billion and covers 42 counties; it even fills the till for three projects in Williamson County.

Among the projects is one that will widen a 2.3 mile stretch of Franklin Road between Concord Road and Moores Lane. Hey, that might make your commute a little quicker.

But the plan does have one notable if not surprising snub:it shows no love for the long-neglected and half-finished Mack Hatcher Parkway.  The project needs federal and state funding to be finished (it is half a circle now; when finished it will create a ring around Franklin.) Every year, it seems, TDOT lets the Mack Hatcher Extension project down easy, with sweet words and promises of next year. But rejection is still rejection.

Something to stew over for 20 or 30 minutes sometime when you are headed home at a crawl through Franklin on 96 one evening.

The TDOT three-year plan still needs to make it through the state house. If local representatives were listening to Franklin mayor Ken Moore at the monthly Williamson County legislators round-table discussion two Fridays ago, the door might could still be open for Mack Hatcher funds.

The projects that did make the governor’s list that affect Williamson County are:

Franklin Road widening from Moores Lane (SR-6, US-31, SR-441) to Concord Road (SR-253). The project is in the construction phase and will begin in 2017. It affects a 2.3 mile stretch of road.[gap height=”20″][gap height=”20″]

Duplex Road in Maury, as well as Williamson, County will be widened from US 31 (SR-6/Main Street) in Spring Hill to near I-65. The project is budged for construction in 2017 and spans 3.3 miles.

The intersection of SR-11 (US-31A) and SR-96 in Triune is budgeted in 2017 for right of way work.

Especially considering that there is a budget windfall this year, Mack Hatcher hopefuls thought its time might have finally arrived. The fiscal year budget for 2017 is $965 million, nearly a third more than 2016’s $660 million.

New federal transportation funding from the FAST Act allowed the state to increase its 2017 budget by 2 percent from 2016; also, the FAST Act provides a one-time provision to tap into an extra $147 million in federal funding. That, along with a $100 million repayment into TDOT in Gov. Haslam’s budget proposal, accounts for the increase.

However, the press release that accompanied the TDOT project list stated that despite the increase in revenue, the department still has a multi-billion dollar backlog of approved- but- unfunded highway and bridge projects.

Nothing in Near Future

01-MackHatcher-MThe Mack Hatcher extension, ostensibly, is somewhere on that list. It remains to be seen if Charles Sargent, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, will be true to his statement to Mayor Moore two weeks ago.

“It would be hard to actually even bid that amount out and spend it in that time,” he said, speaking of the near $2 billion three-year budget and 2017 windfall. “Williamson County will get our fair share, I will assure you of that. One of the projects that we will very likely be doing this year is the widening of Franklin Road near Concord Road.”

To which Franklin Mayor Ken Moore later stood up to ask about Mack Hatcher.

“We are excited to hear about the $800 million [the number mentioned at the discussion] and we are excited to hear that you can’t even spend it all. But we have a shovel ready project called Mack Hatcher  Northwest Extension that is ready to go,” he said to applause from those in attendance and a loud “Amen,” from someone in the back of the room.

“I understand that,” Sargent shot back, quickly moving to nip any notion that he is anything but full-bore for the project. “I think there are a number of us up here trying to get it on the three-year road project. When I talked about Franklin Road I wasn’t jumping any projects that need to be put on there. I agree with you 100 percent. 110 percent.”

He said Mack Hatcher is an example of a project that should be at the very top of the list, considering that Franklin put up money- some $5 million- for engineering for the project.

Apparently, however, Mack Hatcher is not at the top of TDOT’s list. Certainly it is not in the top 94.

Back in November of 2013, the project was not high on the list, then, either. At the time, during a community meeting on Mack Hatcher at Pearre Elementary Schroer explained why:

TDOT, he said, could not justify the revised original 2008 plan price of $80 million nor a revised, lowered-cost plan of $45.2 million.

Schroer’s TDOT follows a descending list of priorities to decide which projects to spend its limited capital on. First is safety, with the most dangerous roads getting funding first, then congestion, and then economic development. Mack Hatcher ranks low on all three:

-It does not exist, therefore its danger is zero. This is a clever argument to use against the Mack Hatcher extension. However, in its defense, the alternative routes are not especially dangerous or deadly.

-Traffic studies, Schroer said at the Nov. 2013 gathering, show that without the extension the traffic is bad but not terrible. Surely traffic has not gotten better on alternative routes in the past two and a half years.

-The residential zoning along the extension would bring very little economic development, and only once-off jobs, during construction. This probably still holds true. Though under scrutiny, the rule seems like it should be a flexible one. To say that potential roads in commercial and mixed- use zones should trump others that lead residential zones is to not really account for the suburban/commuter reality of central Tennessee. The average Williamson County resident has a 27 minute commute. The roads leading away from our homes, lead us from residential to commercial zones.

So, to be funded, the lower the price-tag the better. There are plans for Mack Hatcher, however, that come in as low as $11.35 a year over two years of construction. This, the two-lane alternate plan, builds two of the planned four lanes over two years, with the other two being funded at a later time.

The Mack Hatcher Parkway project, begun in the 1980s, planned to ring around Franklin;it was created with excellent foresight for the growth that the county has been, and will be, experiencing. In 2005 TDOT announced the exact route the western 7.5 mile part should follow, and asked Franklin to design the northwest 3.2-mile quarter-circle from Hillsboro to 96, which gained approval in 2008. TDOT then gave approval for Franklin to purchase the necessary properties along the route’s right-of-way which it completed in early 2011, bringing Franklin’s total input to $5 million.

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