Wednesday, June 26, 2013

UDOT Names First Female Regional Director


For the first time, a woman will head one of the Utah Department of Transportation’s four divisions.
Teri Newell has been named director of UDOT Region 3, which covers Utah, Juab, Wasatch, Duchesne, Uintah and Daggett counties. She was promoted by new UDOT Executive Director Carlos Braceras to replace former Region 3 Director Shane Marshall, the newly named deputy director of UDOT.
For the past 10 years, Newell has been the project manager of the Mountain View Corridor, taking it from early design through completion of its first $730 million phase last December.
That highway in western Salt Lake County offers a 15-mile stretch of two lanes of traffic in each direction between 16000 South and 5400 South at roughly 5800 West. Lanes are widely separated now, and lanes of a future freeway will be built in the extra-wide median.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Study: transportation tax hike would benefit more than it costs


If Utah would raise taxes to invest an extra $11.3 billion on high-priority road and mass-transit projects during the next 30 years, its return would be worth many times that amount — including more than $20 billion in extra tax revenue from economic growth and creation of about 6,000 new jobs a year, a new study says.
That shows "It’s critical that we continue to invest in our roads, our highways, our mass transit," said H. David Burton, the former LDS Church presiding bishop who is co-chairman of the Salt Lake Chamber’s new Utah Transportation Coalition. It sponsored the study by the Economic Development Research Group of Boston.