The state budget crisis has the Oklahoma Department of Transportation taking a hard look at its eight-year plan.
Amid revenue failures, transfers to the general revenue fund and overall budget uncertainty, ODOT suspended several highway projects this year, and the agency is meeting with members of the state transportation commission to come up with ways to work around the funding crunch.
ODOT Director and Oklahoma Transportation Secretary Mike Patterson said some ODOT divisions are delaying as many as two-thirds of their projects right now.
"And that's going to cause us to increase our spending in asset preservation so that we can keep those roads going until we can replace them and those bridges in the air until we can replace them," Patterson said.
Patterson added Oklahoma won’t be able to keep up with a goal of being among the five states with the fewest bridges classified as structurally deficient.
"Because we know that we have to replace 90 bridges a year after 2020 to sustain staying in the top five," Patterson said. "Because we have so many bridges in our system — 6,800 — we have to replace 90 a year."
The state was on pace to have fewer than 1 percent of its bridges labeled structurally deficient by 2020.
"We could put together a plan that would sustain our bridge system, but it would be at the jeopardy of everything else," Patterson said.
