Missouri just locked in how it plans to spend $13.3 billion on roads, bridges, airports, and rail crossings over the next five years — and a chunk of that money is already moving dirt a few miles from home.
The Missouri Highways and Transportation Commission approved its 2026-2030 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program this summer, covering July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2030, according to MoDOT’s own summary of the plan. Of the $13.3 billion, $9.5 billion — roughly $1.9 billion a year — goes to actual road and bridge construction; the rest covers airports, rail crossings, transit, and the state’s other transportation modes. Missourinet’s rundown of the plan notes it also keeps funding flowing to both I-70 and I-44 statewide, on top of low-volume rural roads and bridge, airport, and rail-crossing work spread across the state’s 33,814 miles of highway.
For readers on this stretch of I-70, the plan isn’t an abstraction — it’s the money behind the third-lane project already under construction between Boonville and Rocheport. MoDOT’s project page puts the job at $104 million: a third lane in each direction across the 13-mile stretch between Route 5 in Boonville and the Rocheport bridge (formally the Lance Corporal Leon Deraps I-70 Missouri River Bridge), plus widening of two bridges — one over the Union Pacific tracks at mile marker 113, and the Rocheport bridge approach itself. Capital Paving and Construction broke ground April 3 and has been running the nighttime lane closures and staged work drivers have been seeing since spring. MoDOT’s timeline has the work finishing in late 2027.
It’s also, per MoDOT, the first Improve I-70 project delivered through the traditional design-bid-build process rather than the design-build contracts used elsewhere on the corridor — meaning the design work was locked in before construction started, rather than finalized alongside it.
MoDOT is leaning on its recent track record as it takes this on: over the past decade, the agency and its contractors completed 4,211 projects worth $8.3 billion, delivering them $299 million under budget and 93 percent on time, per Missourinet’s report on the new plan. None of this changes what drivers already know — expect intermittent overnight closures on this stretch through 2027 — but the new five-year plan is the funding commitment that keeps the Boonville-Rocheport work, and the rest of the statewide Improve I-70 program, on the books through the whole build-out.
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