Nashville will be able to carry out its paving plans next year on town streets, but Brown County will have to apply again to get the grant money it was banking on for county roads.
The Indiana Department of Transportation announced the winners of Community Crossings grants on Nov. 7. Brown County was not included on the list of 283 recipients which, combined, received $100 million for road work.
However, Nashville was on the list. The town was awarded $160,923.75. Most of it will go toward fixing the portion of Old State Road 46 that the town is now responsible for maintaining.
This is the second year in a row that Brown County didn’t get funding and Nashville did. A total of 444 cities, towns and counties applied, making the grant process “highly competitive,” INDOT reported.
When asked why Brown County’s application was not approved, INDOT media contact Scott Manning said that the application was missing a “required element for consideration.”
That element was a signed financial commitment letter. A financial commitment letter was submitted, but the names were typed and not signed, he said.
“The Community Crossings program rules require that the financial commitment letter be signed by an official of the local government who has fiduciary authority to obligate and expend the funds intended to be used for the local match on the project,” he said in an email on Nov. 15.
Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner said the signed letter was included.
INDOT’s copy of the financial commitment letter, obtained through a public records request, contained the typed names of Magner and Brown County Commissioners President Dave Anderson but no signatures above them.
Starting next year, INDOT is going to allow communities two chances to apply for up to $1 million in road funding, but they can only pick one application window — in January or in July — and they’ll have to have enough money on hand to put up their required “match” to the grant.
For small communities, the match is 25 percent; for larger communities, the match is 50 percent.
State law requires that half of the available Community Crossings funding go to communities within counties that have a population of 50,000 or less, INDOT reported.
“Only 33 counties got funded out of 92. Only $22 million out of $100 million went to counties,” Magner said. “… Hopefully, in January, it will be just the opposite and the majority of counties will get funded in January versus cities and towns, because they won’t have match money.”
County’s plans
Bellsville Pike, Greasy Creek Road and a portion of Nineveh Road were on deck to be paved next year with money from Community Crossings.
Brown County had applied for $1 million, but received $0.
Down in Warrick County near Evansville, Magner said two towns there — Boonville and Elberfeld — received funding, but the county did not. All three had applied at the same time.
“That’s the frustrating part from our county engineers and supervisor association (Indiana Association of County Highway Engineers and Supervisors) is when we ask questions, they (INDOT) won’t tell us who is on the selection committee or how they decide who gets what money. It’s kind of frustrating,” he said.
Nearby counties Jackson and Lawrence also did not receive any Community Crossings funding this year.
Magner said the county will apply for $1 million again in January to pave Bellsville Pike, Greasy Creek and Nineveh roads.
“If we get our money like we should in January, then that will still allow us to do the same thing we planned on doing to get the work done in 2019. We can still get a bid out for the roads we asked in the November selection,” he said.
“We’re really just losing two months of not knowing what to do. Two months in the wintertime is not bad; it’s just this past year that we lost the whole summer just waiting on them to get the application ready.”
He also intends to apply for money in January to pave Helmsburg Road in 2020.
If the county does not receive Community Crossings grant funding in January, Magner said roads will have to be re-prioritized.
“We’ll have to cut back, but hopefully, we don’t have to do that. We have to be ready one way or the other. If we don’t get it, we’ll do a local bid in the spring, so then we’ll have to decide what we’re going to do at that point and move things around,” he said.
“If by some chance we’re not able to get that grant money, then we’ll probably end up doing at least part of Bellsville with local money and then back off some of the other priorities. But hopefully, we don’t have to go there.”
He said the county prefers to pave higher-traffic roads with grant money because that way it is cheaper to stripe them as well.
In the meantime, highway department crews will continue to do patching and maintenance on county roads.
“We’ll keep patching all of them as needed. … But that’s normal; we have patching all year anyways. I have a separate line item just for patching and it actually still has money in it,” Magner said.
Town’s plans
Nashville will use most of its money to repave Old State Road 46 between Artist Drive to just past the top of the hill at 1174 Old 46 (near the former holistic vet office).
Patching and resurfacing nearby McGee Road also is on the work list for next year.
The county used to be responsible for Old State Road 46, but it is now the town’s to maintain up to the 1174 address, said Nashville Utility Coordinator Sean Cassiday.
In addition to patching persistent potholes on Old 46 and resurfacing that stretch of road, some digging will need to be done to fix the edges, he said.
No sidewalks will be added along Old 46 from town with this project. The problem with installing sidewalks on that road section is the concrete bridge near the highway garage, which is barely wide enough for two vehicles to use, let alone pedestrians as well, he said.
Cassiday said he didn’t know what roads the town would request funding for in January.
Last year he had predicted that the town would be all caught up on the road work it needed to do by 2019, but with the addition of Old 46 to the town’s inventory, the timeline has probably been pushed out about two years, he said last week. After Nashville gets caught up, then it can just focus on maintaining those newly fixed roads, he said.
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One of the town’s Community Crossings projects for 2018 hasn’t been started yet, but it’s supposed to by the end of this month.
Nashville was awarded state grant money last fall to widen Hawthorne Drive to three lanes and add a sidewalk along it. That’s the road that leads from State Road 46 into the shopping area that contains McDonald’s, Brown County IGA, several other businesses and two senior apartment buildings.
Earlier this fall, the delay was with getting a utility company to move its lines in the project area. Now, Nashville Utility Coordinator Sean Cassiday said the paving company is dealing with the weather and other factors.
“They were trying to do it by the 12th, but then they were worried about the temperature change. So we’re looking at the last week of November,” he said last week.
“What’s unfortunate is that Thankgiving week would have been a great week to do it — it’s supposed to be in the mid-50s — but (the paving company) said he couldn’t get anybody to do it” because it’s a holiday week, Cassiday said.
Once the pavers do arrive, the work should take two to three days, he said.
He expected at least one lane to stay open so that access to the busy area wouldn’t be completely cut off.
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