City pulls two roads from urban system

Kalispell Technical Advisory Committee members voted on Tuesday to remove Third Avenue East and Fourth Avenue East from the city’s urban area road system.

The one-way roads will revert back to local municipal control and now can be managed without input from the Montana Transportation Commission, but they also become ineligible for federal urban highway money the city accrues.

Committee members had to pull at least one mile of road from the system because they chose to add Four Mile Drive to the system and use federal highway money to extend that road from where it dead-ends now west to Stillwater Road and build a bridge over the future path of the U.S. 93 Alternate Route.

While that project was nominated locally by the Technical Advisory Committee, it still must be approved by the Montana Transportation Commission, which is expected to consider the nomination in September.

In the meantime, Montana Department of Transportation will continue to study potential risks associated with the Four Mile Drive project, including needed right-of-way acquisition.

Federal law says new road projects once started must be built within six years — a limit that could be reduced to four years — so there are time constraints that must be met.