“Hot off the press, the filial tentative allocation of

“Hot off the press, the filial tentative allocation of funds” will put the parallel laning of Route 211 back on track, resident highway engineer Don Askew confirmed in a telephone interview Tuesday. The $13 million for the project comes from additional highway funding approved by the legislature and Gov. Gerald Baliles’ initiative on transportation, specifically the additional one-half cent sales tax which took effect on Jan. 1, Mr. Askew said. “This new source of funds appears to be relatively stable, and it will allow the department to proceed with projects that have been sitting on the drawing boards for many years,” the resident engineer explained. “Route 211 is one of those projects.” As part of the state’s arterial highway system, Route 211’s widening was supposed to have been finished “a long, long time ago,” Mr. Askew conceded. “We had started buying rights-of-way, then the crunch came.” Oil shortages led to shortfalls in gas tax revenue as maintenance costs skyrocketed, Mr. Askew recalled. This spiraling squeeze put construction projects on the back burner. “It was bad timing” he