 "Photo: Chelsea Baker/The Daily Athenaeum")
The construction of a tollbooth will hold back the completion date for the West Virginia section of the Mon-Fayette Expressway until Spring 2011.
Most of the 3.85 miles of roadway construction in West Virginia including grading, paving, construction of guardrails and signs and bridgework will be completed by late November or early December, said Marvin Murphy, state highway engineer for the West Virginia Division of Highways.
Construction of the tollbooth will begin in the fall to be completed by spring. Originally, tolls were going to be collected in Pennsylvania, with monthly electronic transfers being sent to West Virginia from the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
"The West Virginia Turnpike Authority will be handling our portion," Murphy said. "We wanted to do the open-road tolling, but the legislation was not in place to do that, so we had to go back to the West Virginia tollbooth."
Murphy did not know how much the toll on the West Virginia section would be. He said the booth would be around five miles from the Pennsylvania border and would be a small, limited-manpower facility accepting multiple forms of payment including E-ZPass.
The Mon-Fayette Expressway is a 65-mile road proposed in 1985 to connect Interstate 68 in Morgantown with Interstate 376 in Pittsburgh.
When the project began, the original expected cost for the West Virginia portion was $140.4 million. Murphy said it will finish at approximately $150.4 million.
The Expressway is divided into four parts. The first is from Cheat Lake, W.Va., to Fairchance, Pa.; the second is from Uniontown, Pa., to Brownsville, Pa.; the third runs from Interstate 70 to Pennsylvania Route 51; the fourth runs from Pennsylvania Route 51 to Interstate 376 in Pittsburgh.
The final portion of the Pennsylvania part of the Mon-Fayette Expressway is nine miles long, being built between Uniontown, Pa., and Brownsville, Pa.
Carl Defebo, manager of relations and public relations for the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission, said this section is expected to be completed by the Spring of 2012.
"It's an interchange with routes 51 and 119," Defebo said. "It will be beneficial to West Virginia because it will provide a new, direct link to 51 and 119."
There are already more than 60 miles of the expressway built in Pennsylvania.
The $15.4 million in funding to complete the West Virginia section came from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.