If the price is right, almost 14 miles of roads in the county will be repaved this fall.
Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner announced his paving plans for 2018 at the July 18 Brown County Commissioners meeting.
Roads on the list are: Fruitdale Road and Fruitdale Lane; Spearsville Road and Bean Blossom Road to the county line; Sprunica Road; Mt. Moriah Road; Redbud Lane; Lick Creek Road south of Three Story Hill Road to Cottonwood Road; Christiansburg Road; and south Grandview Road.
Magner said he’d been waiting to see how much money he’d need to save for the state’s matching grant program before finalizing his budget for paving. The roads above will be paved using local tax dollars.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]In addition to those, he’s hoping to get almost six miles of Bellsville Pike, three-and-a-half miles of Greasy Creek Road, almost a mile-and-a-half of Nineveh Road and the Old State Road 46 loop paved through the Community Crossing grant program. However, if that grant plan is approved in November, those roads couldn’t be paved until spring.
Grant applications are due Sept. 28. The county will be required to match 25 percent of the money awarded, up to $1 million.
The county applied for Community Crossings last year to pave Bellsville Pike and Helmsburg Road, but did not receive any funding.
Magner plans to apply for the Community Crossings grant in 2019 to pave Helmsburg Road in 2020, along with Lanam Ridge and Old State Road 46. Those applications are due in January, which means Magner has to save money in his budget for both matches.
The town and county may work together to get Community Crossings money in 2019 to pave Old State Road 46, he said.
Bids for local paving projects this fall are expected to be awarded at the Aug. 15 commissioners meeting. In a July 30 email, Magner said if there is an “obvious good, low bid” then that will be awarded at the meeting, and contracts will be signed at the following commissioners meeting on Sept. 5.
Magner said not all of the roads on his list are guaranteed to be paved; it depends on the cost.
There are also plans to use millings from the State Road 46 East repaving project happening now to resurface the three loops of Old 46, which adds up to about a mile. “They have not been repaved since 1965, or whenever the new highway came through. They are in rough shape. We’ve basically been treating them as a gravel road,” Magner said.
Longer-range plans
Magner prepared a five year paving plan in 2015. At that time, 130 miles of county roads were identified as needing to be repaved out of 200 miles.
His budget was about $100,000. “That would cover about a mile and quarter of the 130, so since then, we’ve been working diligently to come up with the money to redo the budget to get money into paving,” Magner said.
Almost 71 miles of road needed to be paved immediately, Magner said. According to his road improvement plan for 2018-2020, 151 miles of hard surface roads will have been repaved by 2020 using local money and Community Crossings money.
The county has taken out three loans to do bridge and road repairs since 2012.
“We did the road loan as a way to kind of help us fix our problem, because the state was not giving us enough money,” county commissioner Diana Biddle said.
That was before the state increased the money going into the motor vehicle highway fund, which is funded by gas taxes and license and registration fees.
The county has about $1 million more to pay on its last road loan. The Brown County Council recently voted to take out another $2 million bond for different projects in the county, but some of the money might still go toward paving.
In 2016, the county received $1 million in grants and had to match that money dollar for dollar. This allowed the county to pave a little more than 20 miles, including parts of Salt Creek Road, Sweetwater Trail, T.C. Steele and Crooked Creek roads.
Only certain roads qualify for Community Crossings funding, Magner said.
“You have to show a need. You have to show traffic count … the economic factor. Does it go to other state properties?” he said.{p class=”Default”}In 2017, the county applied for $1.3 million to repave Bellsville Pike and Helmsburg Road, but that request was denied.
“We’ve only been able to do about 85 (miles) so far based on funding,” Magner said of the 130 identified in the plan.
“We’re still running behind the eight ball. Some of these projects we delayed before because of either state highway construction or Brown County Water was installing new water lines.”
What gets paved?
To develop the five-year paving plan, Magner looked at road condition ratings, the location of the road, how often it is used, whether the road is part of a bus route, and if it is a priority snow route.
A rating of nine is a perfect, brand-new road; a rating of zero is “totally impassible,” he said. “Most of your rough paved roads that have potholes in them are going to rate somewhere between a three and a four,” he said. “… You could have a short section of road that only rates a three or four, but if it only has two cars a day on it, that’s not a top priority.”
If other projects are planned for the road, like if it’s being used as a detour, or water lines are being repaired along it, those may result in repaving being delayed. “Carmel Ridge and Oak Ridge are perfect examples of that. Two years are we delayed those because of the highway construction. Last year we paved them both,” he said.
“All those factors play into it. It’s not just randomly picking a road because we like somebody who lives on that road. That has nothing to do with it. There’s a lot of people I’m friends with who are mad because they don’t get their roads paved.”
Magner said if the county keeps at the “pace we’re at now,” all 200 miles of hard surface roads in the county will be repaved in less than 10 years.
With the first road loan, the county decided to chip-and-seal roads instead paving them with a hot mix. “Those roads are now showing up in that two- to five-year window of needing to be paved. If that over $1 million in 2013 had been spent on hot mix, in my opinion, those roads would still be good,” he said.
Magner said grinding up road bases also helps keep the roads in better shape for a longer period of time, along with using hot asphalt mix.
“Our window is a minimum of 15 years (of paved road life),” he said. “A lot of other counties I’ve worked with, I could take you down now and show you roads we paved in 1994 that are still good.”
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Old Haggard Road is one problem area that residents have been reporting to their county commissioners.
Brown County Commissioner Jerry Pittman said that road is split between Morgan County and Brown County. Morgan County’s end of Old Haggard is paved, but Brown County’s is gravel. The caller wanted the Brown County end to be paved, too.
Pittman told the caller he wants to pave the road, but the county must maintain current paved roads first.
It costs $100,000 a mile to pave a road, and changing a gravel road to paved is at the upper end of that scale, said Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner.
Pittman said the caller suggested chip-and-sealing the road, but Magner said that would not help.
“That was the trouble over the years, a lot of the roads just got chip-and-sealed. Once you put chip-and-seal on, then you have to start hand-patching them. You can’t go back and grade them,” he said.
Magner said the intent of chip-and-seal is to maintain a coat of pavement or be used as road shoulder material. “It’s not meant to be a mainline pavement, especially if you have truck traffic on it,” he said.
Magner also reported that crews worked overtime last month on a Friday to patch three-quarters of a mile on Nineveh Road from Beech Tree Road to where Cordry-Sweetwater starts.
“There’s so much traffic coming out of the lakes that once it starts getting a rough spot, they just beat it to death,” he said.
“We had a crew hand-patch on Friday and we got several thank-yous right away. They worked until about 2 p.m., then we sent them home.”
The north end of Nineveh Road was paved last year.
The highway department crew has been working four 10-hour days, Magner said.
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A portion of Mt. Nebo Road remains closed from damage caused by a storm in June.
In July, Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner said he was waiting on materials to come in to finish replacing the eight-foot drainage structure that was damaged.
Residents still have access to all properties and houses on both ends of Mt. Nebo Road, he said.
He said the goal was to have the road back open by the time school starts this week.
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Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner presented the following road improvement plans for 2018 through 2020 at the Aug. 1 commissioners meeting.
All paving will be paid for either local funds, like the county’s motor vehicle highway fund, or with Community Crossings grant money. What is ultimately paved will depend on what funding is available from local and state sources.
2018
(locally funded projects)
Lick Creek Road from Three Story Hill to Cottonwood Road: 2.5 miles
Fruitdale Road and Fruitdale Lane: 2.42 miles
Upper end of Spearsville/Bean Blossom roads to county line: 0.75 miles
Sprunica Road: 1.25 miles
Mt. Moriah Road: 0.25 miles
Redbud Lane: 0.25 miles
Christianburg Road: 4.10 miles
South Grandview Road: 2.25
TOTAL: 13.72 miles
2018
(Community Crossings grant-funded projects, with work starting in 2019 if maximum amount of $1.3 million is awarded)
Greasy Creek Road: 3.5 miles
Bellsville Pike: 5.7 miles
Nineveh Road from Beech Tree Road to Cordry-Sweetwater lakes community: 1.48 miles
Old State Road 46 loop in Gnaw Bone: 1.10 miles
TOTAL: 11.78 miles
2019
(locally funded projects)
North Shore Drive: 2.37 miles
Lick Creek Road from Cottonwood Road to State Road 45: 2.4 miles
Dunaway Road from Lick Creek to Oak Ridge roads: 0.26 miles
Hurdle Road: 2 miles
Four Mile Ridge Road: 3.3 miles
North end of Harrison Ridge Road: 1.72
TOTAL: 12.05
2019
(Community Crossings grant-funded projects, with work starting in late 2019 or early 2020 if maximum amount is awarded)
Lanam Ridge Road: 4.15 miles
Helmsburg Road: 5.75 miles
Old 46 from Nashville to Brown County State Park: 1 mile
TOTAL: 10.9 miles
2020
(locally funded projects)
Three Story Hill Road: 3.4 miles
Bear Creek Road: 3.15 miles
Mt. Liberty Road: 3.85 miles
Poplar Grove Road: 3.1 miles
Elkinsville Road: 2.25 miles
TOTAL: 15.75 miles
2020
(Community Crossings-funded projects)
Becks Grove Road: 4.85 miles
Bear Wallow Hill Road: 3 miles
Clay Lick Road: 4.8 miles
TOTAL: 12.65 miles
Source: Brown County Highway Department
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