West Virginia Division of Highways (WVDOH) District 4, which includes Doddridge, Harrison, Marion, Monongalia, Preston, and Taylor counties, has completed nearly $715,000 in paving projects this calendar year. Most projects were completed by the district’s own paving crews, saving taxpayers money and allowing the districts to repave numerous smaller rural roads that might not otherwise get attention for years to come.
WVDOH District 4 Manager Mike Daley said the district began its in-house paving program on March 15, 2023, and completed its paving program on Tuesday, October 31, 2023.
State Transportation Secretary Jimmy Wriston, P.E., said Gov. Jim Justice’s $2.8 billion Roads to Prosperity program, and the Governor’s Secondary Roads Initiative provided a massive injection of funding for the Mountain State’s highway system, giving individual highway districts the ability to invest in local infrastructure as never before.
“We continue to improve our operations and get more and more projects completed,” Wriston said. “We’ve really gotten a tremendous amount of road mileage with fresh, asphalt applied.”
In District 4, Roads to Prosperity and the Secondary Roads Initiative have allowed the district to concentrate its in-house paving force on repaving many of the district’s most rural roads, including many one-lane country roads that hadn’t seen a paver in years. In all, District 4 completed 64 paving projects between March and the end of October.
District 4 paved nearly 115 miles of roadway, many on small country roads a mile or less in length.
Larger paving projects included almost 11 miles of US 50 and several sections of WV 7 in Preston County, more than 12 miles of US 19 and more than eight miles of Days Run Road in Monongalia County, seven miles of Prickett’s Creek Road in Marion County, seven miles of WV 18 in Doddridge County, and almost 13 miles of Jones Run Road in Harrison County.
