MADISON, Alabama — Madison County is now the second largest county in the state of Alabama. "We are growing at a huge pace. We're building more apartment buildings; we're building more subdivisions," Chairman of Madison County Mac McCutcheon shares. "Every time I drive by the highway, and I see an apartment building go up, I'm counting the number of residents that will be living there in those facilities and I start thinking about, well, this is going to be another 300 cars put on the road. So, we've got to continue to move forward but the thing is, we're being very aggressive and we're trying to find as many dollars as we can to try to improve our infrastructure.
Recently funding was approved to help with infrastructure improvements that are all a part of the Metropolitan Planning Organization. "We've got several projects that we had on what we call the transportation improvement plan, and these projects are going to be ongoing and are ready for construction," McCutcheon shares. "We had a total of $421 million of projects that were being worked on and approved through the MP process."
Projects to be worked on include:
Town Madison on Highway 565.
Highway 53. (3 intersections)
The Northern Beltline, which is the extension of 255 connecting over to the parkway.
Maston Lake overpass
Several resurfacing projects that we have in the area.
In my talk with Chairman Mac Mccutheon, I was curious to know when receiving funding, what's the process in choosing which projects to start. "We look at traffic counts. We've got a system in place now to where we can go into our county, and we can get traffic counts on our roads. Safety becomes a major factor," McCutcheon explains. "We look at the number of accidents that happened over a three-year period, serious accidents and we put all of that information together and then they help us make a priority list of what is important and where we need to focus our attention first."
The chairman also discussed the inconvenience a number of projects happening simultaneously can have on commuters, he shared that it's all about taking advantage and moving forward. "It's just one of those things to where with the growth we're experiencing here in our area, we're going to have, just like I mentioned, we're going to have five major projects being worked on at the same time," McCutcheon explains. so, I know it may be an inconvenience to the commuter, but yet at the end of the day, we have to take advantage of the dollars that we have and the process and when we're ready to do construction, we need to move forward as quickly as possible."