Improvements are needed to Highway 19 to accommodate what the top Gasconade County official calls “a monster” of a development being courted by the Montgomery County Port Authority.

Little information is available yet about what appears to be one of the first projects that might be developed after the creation of the Montgomery County Port Authority, whose boundaries include the city of Hermann. The city has one member on the Port Authority Board of Directors, which was created in October by the Missouri Highways & Transportation Commission.

“This thing is going to be a monster,” said Gasconade County Presiding Commissioner Tim Schulte, R-Hermann, at last week’s Commission session in Owensville. “They’re moving right along,” he added, noting that improvements will need to be made to the region’s main north-south highway to accommodate the traffic that would be generated by the development.

“Highway 19 is going to have to be beefed up,” Schulte said. “We need to start getting on the list” to have the highway improved to accommodate the increased traffic that would be associated with the potential development, work that include shoulders and other improvements. “We’re going to have to do some things” to accommodate the increased traffic that would result from the development, he added.

Little information was available from Schulte about the potential Montgomery County Port Authority project, other than the development would take up about 500 acres.

The presiding commissioner said it’s believed the project will come to fruition. “It’s coming,” Schulte said. “The wheels are in motion, but it’s going to happen,” he said.

Helping Gasconade County prepare to benefit from the Port Authority project north of the Missouri River could be a topic of discussion in two weeks between the Commission and staffers with Meramec Regional Planning Commission (MRPC). Personnel from that agency are scheduled to attend the March 21 session of the County Commission for talks on several fronts — focusing primarily on the use of funds that will be received during most of the next two decades resulting from the settlement of lawsuits against the makers and distributors of opioid medication.

MRPC staffers are scheduled to attend the Commission’s March 21 session to begin discussions on how to use about $70,000 received thus far in opioid lawsuit settlement funds. Payments made by manufacturers and distributors of opioids to local governments as part of a class-action lawsuit settlement are projected to be received for the next 17 years. A plan for using Gasconade County’s share of the opioid-settlement money was worked on the past year by Prosecuting Attorney Mary E. Weston and members of the county’s Opioid Settlement Team. At the first of this year, she turned over that project to the County Commission, which, in turn, agreed to have the regional planning agency work on a plan for using the county’s share of the settlement funds.