By Tom Weber & Bill Raack, KWMU
St. Louis, MO – Missouri Transportation Director Pete Rahn says warranties might be one way to ensure that road projects are completed properly in the future.
Rahn says he oversaw a project when he headed New Mexico's Transportation Department in which a road was built with a warranty. That meant that the company that built the road would have to make some repairs for free.
But Rahn says warranties cost extra money, which he says would be better spent directly on repairs.
"The key to all of this obviously would be to catch bad work before we have to pay for it," Rahn said Thursday on KWMU's "St. Louis on the Air." "Maybe someday in the future, we'll reach the point where we can afford to take advantage of that mechanism."
Rahn also said on the show Thursday that the project to rebuild a stretch of I-64 will be done sooner than some estimates.
The state is planning to to completely rebuild 12 miles of I-64 between Spoede Road to Tower Grove, past Kingshighway.
The project will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but Mo-Dot has said that it could take as long as 16 years to complete if funding is held up.
But Rahn said Thursday the project will be done a lot faster than that: "Much less than ten years. The goal that I have used with our team is that, I said that we want to rebuild this in an unreasonably fast time."
Rahn says a design team for the I-64 project should be selected by next May.