Small-town America pins hopes on West trade route

LIMON, Colo. — For Joe Kiely, the drone of thousands of trucks passing his Colorado plains town signals economic prosperity.

The caravans carrying billions of dollars worth of goods move along a 2,300-mile, mostly rural, two-lane trade route from Mexico to Canada, and frequently stop in on towns like Limon (LY-min) and bring business to their hotels, truck stops, gas stations and fast food restaurants.

If the Ports to Plains Corridor is going to be able to handle the increasing flow of goods, Kiely said, the highways need to be expanded. To realize the corridor's potential, Kiely and municipal officials up and down the highway want federal backing for a 20-year plan to expand the road to four lanes.

Some $900 million has been spent since 1997, and this year more than $80 million in stimulus funds went to road construction and improvements on parts of the highway in Colorado, Texas and New Mexico.

"Whether or not the four-lane divided highway gets built in the 20-year time, the amount of traffic that's on these will grow," said Kiely, vice chairman of operations for the Ports-to-Plains Corridor Coalition, a Lubbock, Texas-based lobbying group.

"The result of that will be a more unsafe situation. You can only put so many trucks on a two-lane road."

The roadway goes from the Port of Raymond on the U.S. border with Saskatchewan to Laredo, Texas. It winds its way through Texas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota.

Capitalizing on the North American Free Trade Agreement, the corridor moves produce, livestock, petrochemicals and oil and gas equipment, Kiely said. His group has reached out to Mexico and Canada for political support, and Alberta, Saskatchewan's neighbor to the west, recently joined it.

"It only stands to reason that if there is an opportunity to increase our trade, or streamline our trade, that we should be a partner," said Leonard Mitzel, a member of Alberta's Legislative Assembly. Mitzel noted Canada's oil industry depends on trucks and machinery imports from the U.S. and Mexico.

The nine states accounted for $43.2 billion in corridor truck exports to Mexico in 2007 and $38.2 billion in imports, said the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics' Commodity Flow Survey. They also generated $15.8 billion in truck exports to Canada in 2007 and $13 billion in truck imports.

More billions are shipped among the states. In 2002, for example, Colorado's corridor truck trade with Texas totaled $4.9 billion, according to the latest bureau data. Trade among all nine states totaled $12.4 billion.