LINCOLN — Building new roads doesn't always boost economic development, a new study by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln concludes, but large projects in larger communities have helped increase wages.
"The biggest projects in the biggest cities tend to have the biggest economic impact," Eric Thompson of the UNL Bureau of Business Research said Friday.
Thompson presented the results Friday to the State Highway Commission.
The Nebraska Roads Department sponsored the UNL study. The agency has struggled over the years in using "economic development" as a criteria for road construction because it is so hard to quantify.
Thompson studied the relationship between new roads, viaducts and expressways and the growth in wages in manufacturing jobs over the past 20 years in the state.
Retail and service jobs, Thompson said, tend to be redistributed within a community when a new road is built. Manufacturing jobs, meanwhile, can see growth, he said, by roads producing better access to customers nationally.
Construction of four-lane freeways had the biggest impact in the largest counties in the state, he said, those counties of 20,000 or more in population. Improving two-lane highways or building viaducts didn't show an impact on economic growth in smaller, rural counties, Thompson said.
Randy Peters of the Nebraska Roads Department said the department will continue to use other factors, such as wear and tear and traffic volume, as the top considerations in deciding which new roads to build.
But Peters said an economic impact model developed in the UNL study might be used in the future to "break ties" between projects that rank equally on other criteria.
One highway commissioner from western Nebraska, Doug Leafgreen of Gering, said he considered the study "good news" for construction of the four-lane Heartland Expressway across the rural Panhandle region of the state.
Leafgreen said all the major counties along the route — Scotts Bluff, Box Butte and Dawes — are large enough to benefit by an expressway.
The department is currently ramping up its road-building projects after the State Legislature passed a bill last spring to earmark ¼-cent of state sales taxes to roads beginning in 2013.
The extra $70 million a year will be used primarily to build long-delayed projects, such as widening Nebraska Highway 133 to four lanes from Omaha to Blair and completing bypass roads around Wahoo and Kearney.
At the Highway Commission meeting, Commissioner Rod Vandeberg of Falls City cautioned that some state senators want to repeal the roads funding bill, Legislative Bill 84. He said such a repeal would be "a horrible catastrophe" because communities across the state are now counting on the new projects.
Contact the writer:
402-473-9584, paul.hammel@owh.com
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