Call for infrastructure investment in Mississippi
Increase in Gulfport, Mississippi cargo shipments prompts call for infrastructure investment.
As deputy director of the port in Gulfport Miss., Matthew Wypyski has overseen significant expansion, and plans more in the future.
“If you look year over year, 2016 to 2017 were up a dramatic 30 percent in overall cargo,” he told Fox News’ Douglas Kennedy.
But, it's not more containers coming in. And that’s what has him most worried.
Wypyski is not only responsible for bringing in massive container ships, but also getting them out to the rest of the country. He’s focused on both strong imports and strong exports.
With “lots of trucks coming and going, our surrounding infrastructure needs to be strong,” Wypyski said.
But the surrounding infrastructure has not kept pace with the port’s growth – particularly, highway 49.
Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant spoke to President Trump in February, describing the highway as, “unfortunately, a farm road. It is a narrow, dangerous road.”
It’s also a busy one. Highway 49 is the only main road to get goods in and out of the port of Gulfport.
In fact, 49 is a straight shot from Gulfport north to Jackson, Miss., but truckers have to go through 59 red lights in order to reach the state’s capital city.
Melinda McGrath, the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Transportation, wants to change that.
“That is an incredible amount of red lights, and that means a lot of stopping and starting,” she said.
State transportation officials plan to build a “new, interstate standard highway that takes the freight off of the old, rural dangerous, hazardous road and put it on a roadway that's built just for the freight,” McGrath explained.
She said the new highway would create jobs and transform Mississippi from a rural state into an economic powerhouse.
Bryant is hoping the $4.6 billion price tag fits right into the president's promise to help rural America.
“We’re going to widen that, make it a great, big, beautiful highway,” Bryant told the president, “so people can get their goods and services to the port of the future.”
The president nodded and replied, “good.”
An expanded highway would help Wypyski get his cargo out to the rest of America.
“We want to have that truck traffic move as quickly and efficiently up and down that corridor as is possible,” he said.
That can only happen, he said, by cutting out all those red lights.
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