"It's going to take a lot of lobbying and advocacy to make it happen," Belle Fourche Chamber of Commerce executive Teresa Schanzenbach said of an updated project to extend the Heartland Expressway concept into a four-lane from Texas into Canada.

That effort surfaced Thursday at the South Dakota Department of Transportation five-year planning meeting at Rapid City.

Cal Klewin, executive director of the project from Bowman, N.D., and Pat McElgunn of the Rapid City Chamber of Commerce told DOT officials about the importance of the project.

Klewin noted that the Heartland Expressway and Theodore Roosevelt Expressway are regional extensions of the nine-state Ports to Plains concept running north and south from Texas through Denver, Rapid City, Belle Fourche and northward into energy-producing areas of Canada.

In the Northern Hills and Northwest South Dakota, the most obvious benefit would be along the U.S. Highway 85 corridor north from Belle Fourche to meet four-lane there north to Williston and into Canada.

Schanzenbach said a meeting in Belle Fourche last week brought together South Dakota stakeholders - communities from Rapid City north on I-90 through Belle Fourche.

"We started discussing how not only Belle Fourche, but others along the corridor can become financial supporters of the TRE and Ports to Plains Alliance," she said.

A noncommittal response from state highway officials concerned about decreasing federal highway funding at Thursday's regional highway planning meeting in Rapid City pointed up Schanzenbach's comment that "This is not a project of one, three or five years."

"Whether we like it or not, truck traffic is going to increase on Highway 85," she said. "We need to be concerned about the safety of the truckers who are carrying extremely wide loads, and for the other vehicles, the tourists coming down from Canada and North Dakota."

Schanzenbach mentioned Klewin's comments to South Dakota officials: Wind, oil and gas development along the highway corridor, plus the huge food supplies produced in the otherwise sparsely populated Northern Plains make the highway practical.

"It truly is only a matter of time," she said.

The story of this energy and food corridor needs to be taken to Congress and the general public, she said.

"If rural America doesn't speak up, we are going to be left out in the cold," she said.

That put into other words what state highway officials told West River people at Rapid City Thursday.

Environmental and urban transportation concerns seem to be a current Congressional priority, not roads in rural areas.

Schanzenbach said the Ports to Plains route, and especially the TR Expressway, offer some of the nation's best areas for wind and solar energy.

"Our Canadian partners have signed on and it would be nice to get our oil from people who aren't shooting at us," she said.

In Northwest South Dakota, the 88 miles of Highway 85 north of Belle Fourche is one of the most sparsely populated areas in the continental United States.

"We need to figure out how to get that 88 miles," Schanzenbach said. "North Dakota is on board already. They see that it will be an economic boost for areas that are often forgotten."

The huge wind turbine blades and oilfield equipment trucks already are passing through Belle Fourche illustrating the need for improved northbound travel.

"We are going to start seeing where Harding County is going to get more people," she said. "We have all these rich natural resources, but where the poorest people in the U.S. live."

The highway is vital, she said

"Or you are going to see more outmigration and lower wages," she said. "We have to be visionary with this road."

It's an outgrowth of years of promoting the region's north-south routes that now has a plan that runs from seaports on the Gulf of Mexico into Canada.

"If you're not in their offices in Washington, D.C., even with states including Texas and Colorado, the plan will end up under a very heavy stack of other people's papers," she said.