Normally, if you had a sentence that contained the words, "Bridges," "score," "(MS)NBC"and "high(ly)," one would assume you were talking about Todd, not MoDOT. Luckily for us, though, we are indeed talking about MoDOT and Missouri bridges — to answer Arnold’s presumptive question before it is even asked.

MSNBC has today released a report documenting that thousands of bridges around the country have not received their two-year inspections, as required by federal law. The report is alarming, which was probably the point. But from our perspective, I would like to point out just how well Missouri scored, with only 19 out of 23,694 bridges that have missed their two-year inspection points. This ranks Missouri at 41st among the states. The states that rank above us, which have from 0 to 4 bridges beyond that schedule, all have far fewer bridges.

MoDOT deserves a great deal of credit for sticking to this important inspection schedule. County road departments deserve credit, too, as many of these bridges are locally maintained. This, along with the early success of the New I-64 project, is making my op-ed of last year look rather insightful!