PANAMA CITY — A pair of Bay County transportation projects made the short list to be considered for funding under the Florida Department of Transportation’s Transportation Regional Incentive Program (TRIP) at a meeting last week.
The Regional Transportation Partnership (RTP), a board tasked with setting transportation goals in Bay, Gulf, Holmes and Washington counties, adopted improvement projects for County 389 in unincorporated Bay County and Front Beach Road in Panama City Beach as the top two priorities for TRIP funding during the state’s 2016 fiscal year, which begins this summer.
“When these programs become available through the state, we discuss the projects and rank them,” said Bay County Commissioner Bill Dozier, who chairs the RTP board. “The goal is ... to maximize the funds available in this region. We’re glad to be able to utilize it and help out the area.”
Improvements to County 389 — part of which is 12th Street in Lynn Haven — came out as the top priority project, as ranked by the staff of the West Florida Regional Planning Council and adopted by the RTP. The project calls for new turn lanes, paved shoulders and resurfacing the road between State 77 and U.S. 231.
Dozier said the project is one the county has been eyeing, but without the necessary funding available. Developed in 2005, the FDOT’s TRIP program pays up to 50 percent of public transportation projects in designated regional transportation areas.
“The request was to have TRIP funds to improve the turn lanes, to do some additional paved shoulders ... and resurface approximately 3.82 miles,” Dozier said. “It’s highly needed. That road is traveled very heavily by people going and coming to work.”
The Front Beach Road project, headed by the Panama City Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), calls for the final design phase for the redevelopment of 2 miles of Front Beach Road, spanning from the west intersection of Hutchison Boulevard east to Richard Jackson Boulevard.
The $2 million project is just one piece of an ongoing effort by the city to improve roughly 8 miles of the scenic corridor within the city limits, with improvement projects on the road’s eastern end already completed and construction for another segment slated to kick off sometime this summer.
Panama City Beach CRA Director John Alaghemand said TRIP funding would help the city move closer to construction on yet another phase of the project.
“That would bring us much closer to the construction phase,” said Alaghemand, adding that the city received funding under the same program for a different phase of the project last year. “We try to submit at least one application per year, to hopefully get the ... money to help us get much closer to the construction phase.”
In addition to the two Bay County projects, the RTP also included one Washington County project and one Gulf County project on its TRIP application priority list.
The proposed Washington County project calls for environmental studies, permitting, traffic analysis and right-of-way acquisition for 3.95 miles of Holmes Valley Road between State 79 and Reno Road. The Gulf County project includes design, permitting and construction for County 383, a dirt road also known as 13-Mile Road on the eastern end of the county.