River Valley gears up for I-49 extension

FORT SMITH — The Arkansas Department of Transportation is working to extend Interstate 49 in Arkansas with another 13 miles across the River Valley.

The department’s next project is building a section of interstate from Arkansas 22 near Barling in Sebastian County to the interchange of Interstate 40 and Interstate 49 at Alma in Crawford County.

“That piece from the river up, it certainly will benefit a lot of people,” said Chad Adams, a district engineer with the Transportation Department. “Everybody south of the river, it’s going to improve their connectivity up to Fayetteville and Bentonville and to I-40 east and west.”

The timeline is undetermined. Adams said some preparation work has been done for the section north of the Arkansas River, but the portion south of the river is still in the planning stages. Crews are out doing survey, environmental and geological work required to decide how and where to build across the river bottoms.

“I think there’s an incentive to get that started before the end of this decade, if not sooner,” Adams said. “I would say sooner. Probably within the next three to four years we’ll see a project let.”

Adams said some dirt could be moved as early as 2023.

“Typically, you see a dirt project to build the subgrade, and you have to get enough of that accomplished before you have a paving contract,” Adams said. “They’re usually separate contracts. It’s not going to be one gigantic project, at least historically.”

The next phase of project development will include completing and obtaining agency approvals to reevaluate existing plans, preparing required agency construction permits, and developing final design and construction plans.

The new section of I-49 will be 13.6 miles long and cost an estimated $787 million. It requires a new bridge over the Arkansas River that’s expected to cost $300 million to $400 million. The work is expected to be done in several phases because of the cost.

Work will likely start with building two of the four lanes in the first phase. Final determination of a phased construction approach will be determined during the next phase of development.

The new road will meet up with a four-lane section of highway around Greenwood.

The project is expected to be paid for using mostly money from a sales tax for highway construction extended by voters last year. The measure indefinitely continues the half-percent sales and use tax dedicated to state highways when the current statewide tax sunsets June 30, 2023.

Adams said transportation officials promised a list of big projects they’d do over the next 20 years to sell the tax extension to voters. Passage of the tax extension has allowed the department to to have more confidence in the budgeting and construction process because it now has a better idea how much money it will receive each year, he said.

“On that list it shows that we would be able to build two lanes from I-40 down to Fort Chaffee in that 20 years and, also, two lanes from the south side of Greenwood down to Y City,” Adams said. The new road will largely follow U.S. 71 south of what has been built around Greenwood.

Adams said the plan after reaching Greenwood is to push on to Y City with, initially, a new two-lane highway that will eventually become the new, four-lane I-49. Reaching Y City would be a significant chunk of building the new highway between Fort Smith and Texarkana.

“That part south of Chaffee is really just a line on a piece of paper,” Adams said.

BIGGER PICTURE

Keith Gibson, a state highway commissioner from Fort Smith, said the approval of Issue 1 and a new federal infrastructure bill mean there’s finally money available to start pushing I-49 farther south. The ultimate goal is filling in the current gap by connecting Fort Smith and Texarkana with an interstate. That would complete the I-49 corridor from the Mississippi River in Louisiana to Canada.

Getting the initial 13-mile section completed will have a big impact on economic development in the River Valley, he said.

“That part from Alma to Barling and connecting to the interstate there is so critically important for dragging traffic, particularly truck traffic and industrial transportation into the Chaffee Crossing area, thus the Fort Smith area,” Gibson said. “I think that’s a critical need right now and, particularly with the potential and maybe now likelihood of the development of an Intermodal Port in this area. That would be a huge economic driver to western Arkansas.”

Gibson said getting I-49 done would mean jobs for western Arkansas. There are also safety and convenience aspects, he said.

“There’s just not a good way to get to Hot Springs, and there’s not a real good way to get to Texarkana and those two things need to be improved,” Gibson said.

Gibson said better connections between the bigger cities in western Arkansas would send economic ripples across the state. Plans also call for improvements to U.S. 270, the highway between Hot Springs and Y City, he noted.

“If you look, there’s really not a good way to get from Fort Smith to Hot Springs and that’s really unfortunate because those two communities, there could be a lot of mutual benefit in having a better route to the central part of Arkansas,” Gibson said.

The new section from Alma to Barling was originally part of a larger corridor environmental study known as the “U.S. 71 Relocation.” That study extended from U.S. 71 in De Queen to I-40 near Alma, encompassing about 125 miles. The relocation of U.S. 71 in Arkansas is part of congressionally designated High Priority Corridor 1, running from Shreveport to Kansas City, Mo.

Filling in the gap between Fort Smith and Texarkana has been in the plans for decades. Farther south, almost 300 miles of I-49 is open from a temporary terminus at U.S. 71 and U.S. 59 at the Texas state line north of Texarkana to Interstate 10 in Lafayette, La.