"I hope this is not a funeral," one participant said before yesterday's meeting of the executive committee of the Mon-Fayette Expressway and Southern Beltway.

It turned out to be more like a vigil in intensive care, as attendees heard that preconstruction work on the project's unfinished pieces -- the northern leg of the expressway and two beltway segments -- would soon be halted by a lack of money.

"Without additional funding, we're going to come to a screeching halt," said David Zazworsky, adviser to the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission.

The turnpike has spent $1.7 billion and expects to spend another $445 million before the funding tank is empty, and by sometime in 2011 there will be about 57 continuous miles of the Mon-Fayette Expressway open from Interstate 68 outside Morgantown, W.Va., to Route 51 in Jefferson Hills.

Also completed is the first of three Southern Beltway legs, the six-mile Findlay Connector from Route 22 in Washington County to Route 60 across from Pittsburgh International Airport.

Still on the drawing board, and likely to remain there indefinitely, are the 24-mile expressway leg from Jefferson Hills to the Parkway East, and 26 miles of beltway that would link Route 22 to the Mon-Fayette Expressway at Finleyville. Construction costs for those pieces have been estimated at more than $5 billion.

According to information distributed at yesterday's meeting, at the Holiday Inn Meadow Lands in Washington County, the turnpike has spent more than $110 million planning and designing the unbuilt northern leg of the expressway, and more than $29 million on the unbuilt beltway sections.

It is on the hook for another $36 million to finish existing contracts for design work on the unbuilt pieces.

Without new funding sources, "we can't take any further contractual obligations or advance these projects beyond where they are," said turnpike financial consultant Phil Ouellet.

The turnpike has courted proposals to use private financing to finish the highways.

In January, three private consortiums answered the turnpike's "request for concepts and solutions" for a possible public-private partnership to build the unfinished sections. Similar partnerships have been used in other states and around the world to build highways that lacked sufficient public funding.

Turnpike officials have refused to publicly release the proposals submitted by the three consortiums, and Frank Kempf, the turnpike's chief engineer, told attendees yesterday that he had been advised by legal counsel not to say much about them.

But he did say that "there is a funding gap between the amount of financing that a private concern might bring to the table" and the cost of the remaining segments.

He said turnpike officials have not decided whether to take the next step -- issuing a formal request for proposals from private firms interested in financing, building, operating and maintaining the unbuilt sections.

"We'll move forward at the appropriate time," he said.

Work continues on the West Virginia portion of the expressway, which is expected to open in fall 2010, according to Paul Mattox, the state's transportation secretary.

Construction also is under way on the $882 million Uniontown-to-Brownsville section of the expressway. The first phase opened in October and the entire stretch is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Turnpike officials yesterday floated ideas to generate more public funding, including lifting a cap on the state's Oil Company Franchise Tax (essentially a gasoline tax increase that would be mostly borne by motorists) or seeking funding in the upcoming federal surface transportation authorization bill.

But some of the state lawmakers in the room said they expected the Legislature to be too consumed by closing a projected $3 billion budget deficit to raise new money for transportation projects.