Work to widen and improve a five-mile stretch of W.Va. 2 between Kent and the Marshall-Wetzel County line should begin soon and stretch through 2025.

On Thursday, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., a ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, met with state Department of Transportation Deputy Secretary Jimmy Wriston to discuss the road work at a facility along the state route.

Capito said the work to widen the route from two lanes to four is currently in the permitting process, and is expected to begin in the next couple months. The project is expected to conclude in 2025.

In addition to widening the road, Capito said the highway is also to be moved further up the neighboring hillside.

She added that the road work portion of the project would constitute around $200 million, the bulk of which would come from Gov. Jim Justice’s Roads to Prosperity project, while also hopefully securing a $20 million INFRA grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“We are in the process now of writing a new five-year bill — hopefully bipartisan, that’s how we’re working — and part of the dollars that go into a project like this are the dollars that come through the surface transportation bill,” Capito said. “We were able to help them with a specialized grant, we wrote a letter of support, we worked with the DOT, and the governor, with his Roads to Prosperity, is where the bulk of the money is coming from.”

Several industrial sites dot W.Va. 2 south of Moundsville, including the Blue Racer, Covestro, and AEP Mitchell plants. The route sees heavy industrial traffic, both in volume and in weight. Improving the traffic flow of the road, Capito said, would be a boon both to locals and to business.

“It’ll take a lot of pressure off this industrial park,” she said. “… A lot of it’s not going to be the old highway. They’re going to move it for safety reasons, for industrial reasons. … This is important, because of the heavy use of the road, for the industrial use and for safety reasons.”

In addition to the roads, Capito said another project along the southern end of the county is an extension of water services, which also falls under the purview of the SEPWC. Capito said the Grandview Public Service District would extend further down to serve the residential and industrial customers through the south end of the county, which she said represented “quite an investment.”

The water service extension, Capito said, would represent an investment of more than $3 million. However, $1.9 million of that would be covered through a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration.

“We’re writing a large infrastructure bill,” she said. “This is a big topic of conversation in Washington: ‘What should the future of infrastructure look like?’ And I’ve met with the president, to talk to him about this, so I’m going to be a key player here. But we need to make sure that we’re modernizing our infrastructure, and that we’re not including everything and the kitchen sink into our infrastructure plan.”