About a dozen lawmakers and wildlife and transportation officials stood along a southwest highway, sinking their new, sparkling gold shovels into the dirt.
“We’ll turn some dirt and kick this project off,” said Darin Westby, Wyoming Department of Transportation director, to the small crowd last week.
It’s the start of the Highway 189 South Kemmerer Wildlife Crossing Project. Wyoming has several other completed projects in the state, but future efforts are in question because of shakeups in federal funding.
The Highway 189 plan homes in on 30 miles of road and will include new fencing, seven wildlife underpasses and one overpass between Evanston and Kemmerer. When it’s complete in fall 2027, it’ll ideally end most wildlife-car collisions there. Experts say this kind of infrastructure, which funnels big game through the under or overpasses rather than on the road, can reduce collisions with cars by up to 90%.
“Thank you to all who have a vision of a Wyoming where we don't hit wildlife on the roads anymore,” said Sarah DiRienzo, senior policy advisor to Gov. Mark Gordon.
The feds funded the bulk of the roughly $32 million dollar project. It came out of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program’s 2022-23 grant funding. The federal program was started in 2021 to target wildlife collisions and improve habitat connectivity.
“In creating the Wildlife Crossing Program, Congress found that there are more than 1,000,000 wildlife vehicle collisions annually which present a danger to human safety and wildlife survival, cost over $8 billion, and result in approximately tens of thousands of serious injuries and hundreds of fatalities on U.S. roadways,” according to the program’s webpage.
But the program is funded by the Biden-era Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which has been the target of Pres. Trump’s federal cuts and funding freezes. This included stalling federal money for future crossings.
Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Angi Bruce said the state and private donors are scrambling to make a Dubois effort happen, but they still need help.
“We are asking our federal delegation to recognize all these efforts and create a sustainable federal funding source that we will need in order to do the next projects as well,” Bruce said.
The Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program could’ve done just that, but it didn’t award Wyoming money for that project this year. The program didn’t open up for applications earlier this summer.
