5/19/26, The Leader-Telegram, Eau Claire – From interstates to intersections, bridges and roundabouts, it is clear that roadways play a pivotal role towards the local economy.
Eau Claire County Administrator Jon Johnson said, “Transportation means everything when it comes to moving goods and services. It’s the lifeblood of our economy.
“When it comes to our townships, our municipalities, our league, our counties and the state, we work together really well here in Wisconsin. Our road builders, our union operators, we get together and say, ‘We’ve got to get this done right.’ We’ve done that over the years, and I think we can do it again here in Wisconsin.”
On Tuesday, the current state of infrastructure and opportunities ahead were talked about during a roundtable discussion with local elected officials, community leaders and industry partners from Northwest Wisconsin.
The event in Eau Claire was one of several discussions hosted across the state by the Transportation Development Association (TDA), a statewide multi-modal transportation advocacy group.
TDA Executive Director Debby Jackson said their motivation for an event like this was to get to a long-term fix for transportation funding. She said it will take partnerships, policymakers understanding the stakes and local governments who can speak to the needs.
“The goal is to have a conversation or at least start one throughout the state about the importance of transportation, the impact that it has on our communities and some of the opportunities and challenges we see going forward; the largest one being funding,” she said.
St. Croix County Highway Commissioner Robbie Krejci said, “Sometimes we’re forced to make the best bad decision we can make because we don’t have adequate funding to fund the right solution. We make the decision to fund the solution we can, and that doesn’t always put us in the best position to grow our system or to provide adequate traffic safety.”
Krejci said anecdotally that all of the sudden, an intersection starts failing and they need a roundabout costing $3 million. For St. Croix County, that composes roughly three-fifths of the entire construction budget.
Amid the navigation of those funding challenges is grant support from the state and federal government. City of Eau Claire Engineering Director Leah Ness used Birch Street as an example of a project utilizing those funds.
“It was reconstructed in 1998 with a concrete surface that really took some wear and tear over the years,” she said. “It failed early in its stages, so in the last couple of years, our street maintenance department could not continue to keep doing the joint repairs on this roadway to our downtown. Overall, we ended up looking at a surface improvement through this area. The project was estimated at $1.2 million, and about one million of it was the surface improvement.”
In applying for the Local Roads Improvement Program (LRIP) through the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, funds provided roughly 15 to 16% of the surface cost to help complete the project at an earlier date.
When starting at the city in 2013, Ness said their budget for street improvements was around $7 million. That number has dropped to $5 million in recent years while roadway numbers and lane miles have increased.
“So with our budgeting, we’re trying to use different funding mechanisms to try and keep our infrastructure at the same level as what our residents expect,” she said.
In an interview with the Leader-Telegram, Ness said, “Just speaking from right now, we are working on obtaining local bridge funding for the Eddy Street Bridge, and we were able to obtain funding for the Dewey Street Bridge. Both are very high cost projects that we’re able to supplement with grant funding.”
Other areas of work regarding Eau Claire’s roadways include signal improvements at intersections like Birch Street and Hastings Way to lower the potential for crashes.
“When we can do that, we’re limiting the emergency response times to those intersections or the number of times that they’re having to go out there,” Ness said. “So we’re improving the safety of the community, but we’re also helping the operations that we have to provide as well.
“We’re seeing construction costs go up, so we’re trying to really find the most efficient ways of maintaining the infrastructure.”
With the discussion wrapping up, Jackson said she believes transportation advocacy is important in coming to legislators and leaders with the issues and impacts to the community.
“We have challenges in our various systems, whether we’re talking about urban or rural, north, south — every community has their own challenge,” she said. “So how do we build a coalition where we can work together to ensure we get what our system needs? I would encourage [attendees] to ask questions and make sure candidates and legislators know transportation is important.”
For Ness, there are clear needs even outside of Eau Claire when it comes to transportation improvements and maintaining good systems for emergency purposes, commuting or even tourism and travel.
“I think that [governing bodies] really see the need to maintain the transportation system, and I hope that just the funding to do that is maintained as well.”