10/10/2024, La Crosse Tribune –
While Coulee Region candidates differ on a number of issues ahead of the November election, all have found common ground on the desperate need to invest in transportation.
On Thursday morning, local officials and industry leaders came together for a bipartisan roundtable discussion of transportation opportunities in western Wisconsin.
“This is not a partisan issue. It’s a safety issue, it’s an economic development issue, and it’s about the welfare of our residents,” said Debby Jackson, executive director of the Transportation Development Association of Wisconsin. “In recent years, with the increased investment at the state level and at the federal level, we’ve made progress in stabilizing our conditions. We’ve seen areas of improvement, but we can’t be complacent.”
Wisconsin’s transportation fees are fixed and flat, so as inflation causes costs to rise, funding remains the same, making it difficult to maintain transportation systems.
“By the time we see transportation conditions start to deteriorate, we’re many years away from seeing those conditions improve,” said Jackson. “We are never going to check off our to-do list. The needs of our transportation system are dynamic, and they are as dynamic as the economy and the communities that it supports.”
Thursday’s panel featured La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds; Jarrod Holter, city of Onalaska director of public works; Bob Gollnik, executive director of the La Crosse Area Planning Committee; Mike Hesse, town of Farmington chair; and Phil Hewitt, Vernon County Highway commissioner.
A large portion of the discussion focused on a key industry in Wisconsin – agriculture.
“In western Wisconsin, no one road has the nicest route to get to something – it’s always that amalgamation of state highway, county roads, town roads,” said Hesse.
Hesse noted the difficulty semis have in bringing agricultural products from one county to another due to hills, roundabouts, stop signs and other factors that make traveling through the region difficult.
“We need to make our decisions about transportation within the context of how it impacts communities around our cities, how it impacts the sprawl into our agricultural areas,” said La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds. “Think holistically about how transportation impacts the use of our land in our ever-shrinking amount of agricultural land that we have in the state of Wisconsin. … We need to have an impact on that.”
Among the range of topics discussed, the difficulties consistently came back to a lack of funding available to make necessary repairs and keep up with road maintenance.
“A lot of our agencies are experiencing continued pressure to provide more services,” said Gollnik. “We have an aging community with the same amount of budget.”
Hesse pointed to a fatal crash that occurred Saturday in Farmington, when a 34-year-old was killed. Hesse said if the town had the money to invest and update old road infrastructure, the situation could have been very different.
“The flexbeam went through his Silverado pickup truck – through the engine compartment, through the passenger compartment, and out the tailgate,” said Hesse. “He had a toddler at home … and his third child is due next month.”
A $20,000 investment could have been the difference between life and death.
All major local officials and political candidates were also in attendance, excluding Cedric Schnitzler who was on official Monroe County business, but was represented by a campaign official.
All the candidates in attendance emphasized that if elected, they would make transportation a priority.
“We need to continue to invest in transportation,” said state Sen. Brad Pfaff, who serves on the transportation committee. “More needs to be done at that state level to make sure that our regional airports also have advocates.”
Other important transportation infrastructure included the Port of La Crosse and Amtrak, which recently had an extra trip added earlier this year that stops in La Crosse.
“The inaugural run of the Amtrak Borealis service in May, which was kind of a result of some visionary thinking 25 or 30 years ago by a group of legislators in Illinois and Minnesota and Wisconsin,” said Gollnik. “That’s really outpaced even the most optimistic projections. We’re seeing 300 or more riders on average a day in each direction.”
While the Amtrak was a monumental moment for transportation within the Coulee Region, officials and industry experts agreed there is much work to be done to continue improving and investing in the region’s aging infrastructure.