HERMANN — A new list of priority road-and-bridge projects for Gasconade County is expected to emerge Thursday morning from the annual conference between local government, state highway agency and regional planning commission personnel.

The session for updating the county's 5-year Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) is set for 10 tomorrow morning when the County Commission, Missouri Department of Transportation District Engineer Preston Kramer and Meramec Regional Planning Commission Executive Director Bonnie Pruegge sit down to pencil in the newest set of priority projects.

Invited to offer their input on the potential priority projects will be representatives of the county’s municipalities.

The annual exercise is a bottom-up process in which county officials tell the Missouri Department of Transportation what they believe the priority projects should be. This process grew out of the federal highway act known as ISTEA — the Intermodel Surface Transportation Enhancement Act — adopted during the Clinton Administration. Prior to this legislation, the process was top-down; that is, the state highway agency decided which projects would be the priority projects and county administrators had little say in the decision.

After the County Commission, MoDOT and MRPC create a priority list for the county, the three or four priority projects will be considered by Meramec Regional Planning Commission’s Transportation Advisory Committee (TAC), which will review the priority projects from all eight counties within the Meramec Region. From that panel, the priority list for the entire region will to the MRPC Board of Directors in December. The priority list approved by the board will be forwarded to MoDOT to be included in the statewide TIP.

The plan is a 5-year blueprint for transportation projects statewide and is updated every year. Some projects are on a county’s list of a dozen or more projects for many years and might never be deemed a priority project. Others can be deemed a priority by county officials but not rated highly by the regional planning agency board or not acted on quickly by MoDOT. One such project in Gasconade County is the replacement of the one-lane bridge over First Creek on Highway J in the northern end of the county. That project — considered one of the worst bridges in the entire Meramec Region — has been a priority project for several years and finally is scheduled to be replaced next year.

Meanwhile, Gasconade County residents are not doing very well in taking part in the U.S. Census. Presiding Commissioner Larry Miskel, R-Hermann, a member of the MRPC board, noted at last Thursday’s session that the latest figures show only 56.9 percent of the households had completed the census questionnaire. The national average for completion as of last week was 66.7 percent.

As low as Gasconade County’s completion rate might seem, it still was the second-highest percentage of all eight Meramec Region counties.