When paving plans are announced for county roads each year, the one question many residents have is: What about my road?
The answer is: Not all county roads can be paved at once because of limited funds, and roads are prioritized for paving using a rating system.
At the May 1 Brown County Commissioners meeting, resident Tim Clark encouraged the commissioners and Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner to create a long-term financial plan for doing road repairs and other work on county-owned properties. That report would outline when they think money will be available to pave certain roads, repair ridges and work on county-owned buildings.
“When you’re considering borrowing additional money (for other county projects), at least we have some idea of what we have funded and what’s unfunded — just thinking ahead and being proactive,” Clark said.
As of last week, Magner didn’t have his plans ready to show which roads he planned to pave with local tax money later this year.
Last August, a consulting firm told county officials that more than $9 million worth of bridge work needed to be done in the next nine years, in addition to working on other county roads. Magner said last year that the total cost of that bridge work is likely to go down because some projects will be done locally and not to federal standards.
Commissioner Diana Biddle told Clark that the commissioners did begin looking at roads and bridges in need of repair, which is why they began taking out $2 million loans every two years. The county has taken out three loans to do bridge and road repairs since 2012. They are paid back with property taxes.
Previously, road loan money was used to chip-and-seal roads, making a hard surface which is not as durable as asphalt paving. Now, “we’re hot mixing. We’re not wasting money on chip-and-seal on top of a road that has no base and will fall apart,” Magner said.
The plan is to continue taking out loans to pay for road and bridge repairs every few years. If the county chooses to build a new justice center and take out a $10 million bond for that, then the $2 million loans for roads would happen every four years, according to a financial plan by Baker Tilly Municipal Advisors.
“To Tim’s point, we’re not ignoring it. I think that we’ve addressed quite a bit of it in the last four years,” Biddle said.
Clark said he was not a fan of borrowing money to pave roads, which he said is a “core government function.”
“If you have to borrow money as a last resort, fine. But what other options work? What areas of waste can you look at and say, ‘Hey, let’s use this money and budget it for roads and maintenance instead of borrowing money?’” Clark said.
What about my gravel road?
At the March 20 commissioners meeting, former highway superintendent Ron Fleetwood presented a slideshow on the condition of gravel roads in Van Buren Township. Commissioner Jerry Pittman told him it would be cheaper to maintain paved roads versus gravel, but turning gravel roads into paved roads would cost at least $30 million.
Magner said earlier this month that to pave a gravel road would cost at least $250,000 or more per mile. For comparison, it costs around $100,000 a mile to repave a paved road.
Using those figures, to pave the 200 miles of gravel roads in the county would cost at least $50 million. That’s roughly three times the size of the county’s entire budget.
Magner said that with soil types here, some of the roads are better off being gravel. “Even if we put stone on them three or four times a year, we can haul a lot of rock for less than $100,000 a mile,” he said.
“There are (gravel) roads that are low speed, dead-end roads. … We’re not going to build a … 20-foot-wide paved road with shoulders. It’s just not going to happen.”
The county has enough trouble getting money to maintain the paved roads it already has, he said. “We want to make sure we can get that 200 (paved) miles resurfaced first before we start paving any of the gravel roads,” he said.
“Most counties pave 10 to 15 miles of road a year,” Biddle added. “We’ve been paving close to 20 or 25. We’ve paved 100 miles of road in four years, which is unheard of anywhere of any other county of our type of makeup.”
What’s the road budget?
When Magner took over as highway superintendent at the end of 2014, he inherited a budget for 2015 that had $100,000 set aside for road paving for the entire year.
“That’s less than 1 mile (of paving), and out of that (also) came patch money. We had gone from a budget that allowed for paving 1 mile a year to what we’ve done over the last three years,” he said.
Magner restructured the budget. The county began taking out loans and started applying for Community Crossings grant funding to pave roads.
Last year, the highway department budget was approved at $3.1 million.
Property taxes do not generally pay for roads unless a separate loan is taken out to help pay for them, as the county has been doing lately.
Money to pave and maintain county roads usually comes from gas and excise taxes through the state, the state Community Crossings grant program, and from the wheel tax you pay when you register vehicles in Brown County.
Earlier this year, the county received $1 million to pave roads through Community Crossings. Getting that grant required the county to put up $250,000 of matching money.
Three county roads are on the list to be paved using the grant money this fall: Bellsville Pike, Greasy Creek and Nineveh roads.
Last fall, Brown County’s application for Community Crossings money was not approved because it was missing a signed financial commitment letter. A financial commitment letter was submitted, but the names were typed and not signed.
“We intend to file for that every year as long as that program is available,” Magner said.
Is there a long-term plan?
Clark encouraged the commissioners to look at road maintenance plans in other counties. He is one of the administrators on the Facebook group Brown County Matters, where people often post about the conditions of their roads or other concerns about infrastructure and government.
“Mike, I wouldn’t want your job, especially when it snows or rains, but a lot of things people complain about, it’s good information,” Clark said. “They’re telling you, ‘Hey I don’t have the information. What’s going on? When is my road going to be paved?’”
Clark said that having a maintenance plan showing how many unfunded projects there are and when the county could expect to fund them would help.
“I’d love to say (when they comment), ‘Gee whiz, why isn’t my road getting paved?’ Boom. ‘Here’s the county road and maintenance plan, where you’ll come up with that money,’” Clark sad.
“Unfunded requirements is a nice thing to have. … That forces you to look at other aspects of government to say, ‘Hey, are there areas we can cut? Are there areas we have to grow?’”
The county does use a Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating, or PASER, scale to rate road conditions and determine which roads need to be paved first.
The county also sometimes chooses to pave roads in the same township because it’s cheaper to keep road crews closer together than spreading them out throughout the county, Biddle said.
The county highway department also has an asset management plan that is part of the Community Crossings grant application. But Magner said he would be cautious about publishing a long-term list of road paving plans because it’s a document that changes often as the conditions of roads change.
“I was going back to looking at what I had given you last fall as a proposed ‘18, ‘19 and ‘20 paving plan. Due to this winter (when flooding damaged other roads), those priorities are changing already,” he said.
“If people in the community would just not jump to conclusions when they read it and say, ‘You put it in black and white that my road is going to be paved next year.’ That’s what we hoped for, but it may not happen.”
The priorities change depending on the funding source for paving, too. “If there’s not enough money to go around, they (the Indiana Department of Transportation) will select projects based on merit (for Community Crossings),” Magner said.
“They want to see projects on thoroughfare roads, that are connective roads and tied to other projects … so that’s why we’ve been picking roads like Bellsville Pike and Salt Creek and Sweetwater Trail.”
When the county receives road grant money, that frees up other local money to pave more roads. But planning for a $1 million road grant that may not ever come also causes problems. “If that doesn’t come through, and you only get a part of that or none of it, then that changes the whole plan for two, three or four years down the road. You pull a million dollars out of that plan, that’s a huge difference,” Magner said.
Commissioner Jerry Pittman agreed that the board needed financial planning that identified needs that are both funded and unfunded.
“We could do all of the financial planning we want to about our roads and we could make all of the projections we want to, but if we have a $40 or $50 million price tag to fix everything the way we would like them to be and we’re getting a couple of million dollars a year, where is the rest of the money going to come from?” Pittman said.
“When we borrow money to pave roads, that $2 million, you get it paid back out of property taxes. … We’ve got this problem here that is gallon-sized and we have the assets about the size of a pea to try and do it with, and no matter how much planning we do or what we do to identify, it doesn’t change the amount of money we have to work with. We have to make due the best we can with what we have. I think Mike has done a good job of that.”
Clark encouraged the commissioners to educate residents on the unfunded projects by creating a plan.
“If you have a plan and say, ‘Oops this happened,’ you adjust it. You have your plan, your actual and dynamics so people understand that,” he said.
“No one in government ever has enough resources to do everything they would like to do. … Educating folks is helpful, when they see what the price is on some of these things and the priorities. At least they say, ‘Hey, you’ve got a plan. Here’s how you determine priorities based on conditions of roads.’”
