Transportation Commission approves five-year road plan

The Iowa Transportation Commission today approved a five-year plan for highway construction that’ll spend about 400-million dollars each year. Jon Ranney, the director of the Department of Transportation’s Office of Program Management, says the plan focuses on three major highway corridors. He says the Avenue of the Saints corridor in southeast Iowa is scheduled for completion, as is the Iowa 60 corridor in northwest Iowa from Sioux City to the Minnesota border and the Des Moines to Burlington section in southeast Iowa. The I-235 project in Des Moines is also scheduled to be completed. Ranney says another part of the plan includes taking care of existing roadways. He says there’s an increased emphasis on maintaining the existing highway system with major projects in the five-year period scheduled for Council Bluffs, Sioux City and Iowa City. Ranney says the plan includes other smaller maintenance projects too. He says the program increases the emphasis on maintaining pavements across the state as well as maintaining and replacing bridges across the state. To see the entire plan, you can visit the D-O-T’s website at: www.dot.state.ia.us.