Why aren’t we paving yet?
When are you going to fix my road?
The Brown County Commissioners and Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner have been getting a lot of phone calls lately.
Residents have been asking for long-term paving plans as well as what’s on the list for this year, but those haven’t been publicly released yet.
Some residents attended the May 17 Brown County Council meeting to talk about these topics, and others talked with the commissioners at their meeting two days later.
The county council is not responsible for road paving. That is under the umbrella of the commissioners, who hire the highway superintendent and help oversee the department’s paving projects.
Guy Knaus lives on Three Notch Road. He recently started a website about the county’s roads and started an online petition that gained more than 200 signatures to fix the roads in the county. There is also a Facebook page dedicated to Brown County road conditions that has nearly 1,500 members.
Knaus logged into the virtual county council meeting after not being able to reach Magner. He said he left him many messages over a three-week period.
“Nobody wants to seem to answer our questions. What kind of guidance, what kind of help can you guys offer to me?” Knaus asked the council.
“We have to get something going, because when my kids come home from riding the bus to school and they say, ‘Dad, the bus driver has to slow down so far so we don’t hit our heads from a pothole by the bus jumping around and moving around. What are they going to do?’ I don’t know what to tell them.”
Commissioner Diana Biddle, who also was at the council meeting, said Magner is often out driving trucks and working on the roads due to a shortage of employees in the highway department.
At the May 5 commissioners meeting, Magner reported he’d hired two people and had two more going through the pre-employment process. The department also recently hired a bookkeeper and the front office is now completely staffed.
“He is not able to do a lot of PR work with the public,” Biddle said.
“I can understand that, but three weeks of messages that is kind of extreme,” Knaus responded.
Magner also attended the virtual council meeting, but didn’t speak much.
Biddle said the highway department and commissioners are working as fast as they can to make improvements.
“Right now we have to wait for the asphalt plants to open and we have to wait for these paving contractors to come back and get finished,” she said.
Council President Dave Redding said he had been contacted by someone who lives on Four Mile Ridge Road with concerns. “I went and I drove it. They were exactly right. They were not exaggerating at all. That was maybe about a month ago,” he said.
“I think one of the important things is, we don’t try to explain this away, because it’s a problem,” Redding said.
Knaus said there are roads in Hamblen Township that have not been touched.
“We want people to come down here and visit Brown County, visit downtown Nashville, but you have motorcycle riders who refuse to ride our back roads to see the beautiful country side because of the road conditions,” he said.
Who’s responsible for what?
State highways are paved by the Indiana Department of Transportation, county roads are paved by the county, and Nashville roads are paved by the town.
State highways are state roads 45, 46 and 135. Town roads are generally in and around Nashville. County roads are all other roads that aren’t privately maintained by a neighborhood or the Cordry-Sweetwater Conservancy District.
Where does the money come from?
Money to pave and maintain county roads comes from gas and excise taxes through the state, from a state grant program called Community Crossings, and from the wheel tax you pay when you register vehicles in Brown County.
Last year, the county received $1 million from Community Crossings. The plan was to use it to pave all of Becks Grove Road from State Road 135 to the county line; Mt. Liberty Road from Bellsville Pike to Rinnie Seitz Road; and the southern end of Lick Creek Road south of Cottonwood Road to State Road 45.
That was the third time the county had received $1 million from the program. But the work was delayed on Mt. Liberty and Lick Creek due to weather, and only some prep work on Becks Grove was done in 2020. The county hasn’t applied for road grant money this year yet.
Once those three roads are paved this year, the county will be able to apply in the second round of Community Crossings.
At the May 17 council meeting, Knaus said there is “a lot of misconception” about how much money the county has to spend on roads and if that money has gone to other sources.
“Do we have money in excess to spend on the roads? Do we have money saved back?” he asked.
“Everyone is under the impression the money for the roads is going somewhere else.”
The motor vehicle highway fund is the local fund most often used for road paving. In April 2020, the county council did transfer $150,000 from that fund as a loan to help the Brown County Music Center make its mortgage payments when shows were shut down to the pandemic. But that loan was paid back to the MVH fund out of innkeepers tax money at the end of the year.
This April, the county also pledged $250,000 from the MVH fund to meet the match for the Helmsburg stormwater project grant, but Biddle said she doesn’t expect to actually use that money for that purpose. That money was just temporarily transferred until the county could get its American Rescue Plan funding from the federal government, which it intends to use as the actual match for the stormwater grant.
The MVH fund had $600,000 budgeted for 2021 for paving and another $333,334 for Community Crossings grant matching funds. To get Community Crossings grant money, the county has to put up a 25 percent match.
There was another $20,000 in the MVH preservation fund for paving and $15,000 for asphalt materials this year.
Last week, Magner said his goal is to use $1 million in local funding, including some of the unappropriated funds in his budget, for additional paving this year besides Community Crossings-funded projects, giving the county a potential maximum of $2 million to work with.
How many miles have been paved?
When Biddle took office in 2015, the county had paved 10 miles of road in four years. During her first year, the county paved 25 miles of road, she said. Now the county has paved around 120 miles of roads, not including 11 miles to be paved this summer using Community Crossings grant funding.
“No other county has repaved the percentage of roads that Brown County has,” she said.
“That is due to our Community Crossings grants and the fact we do a $2 million capital improvement loan every two years. We dedicate part of that money to purchasing additional asphalt.”
Magner has identified about 60 more roads that have not yet been paved since 2015. The county has more than 200 miles of paved roads total.
He said at the May 19 commissioners meeting that there are 106 miles of paved roads left to repave. He estimated that by the end of this year, the county will have repaved a minimum of 130 miles, but closer to 140 miles.
“Our goal five years ago was to try to do 20 miles a year, which was a shot to the moon with finding the money to do that, especially when I inherited a budget that only included $100,000 for the entire year to pave roads, so that covers one mile,” he said.
Where is the paving plan?
At the May 5 meeting, Biddle said she had asked Magner for a paving plan update and had received a draft of the plan for 2021-2024.
At the meeting on May 17, Magner provided past road plans from 2015-2017 and for 2018-2020, but not the 2021-2024 plan. Biddle said it wasn’t finalized yet.
Biddle said the highway department will work on the future paving plans when it comes time to apply for the second round of Community Crossing grant funding this year. But, those plans will continue to change as the condition of roads change.
The past years’ road plans are available online at browncounty-in.gov/BoardsCommittees/CountyCouncil.aspx.
The 2015 plan identified nearly 80 miles of county roads that immediately needed repaving. At that time, it would have cost $11.2 million to do.
Since 2015, Magner said also he has upgraded equipment to prep roads for paving and built new facilities to take care of road materials and equipment, including a new salt dome and storage barn.
Resident Amy Sherman said it would cut down on questions if residents could see when their road might be paved. “As people who live in the county, we have no idea what the paving plan is,” she said.
At the beginning of the year, the commissioners and Magner give their “best guess” as to what roads are going to be worked on that year, “But if something happens, like if a road washes out, then that changes,” Biddle said.
Knaus and Sherman both flagged Ford Ridge Road as in need of attention because of a washout.
“It is so bad that the gravel and the sand and the dirt from underneath the road has come up to the surface and created a U-shaped dip on one side and a U-shaped dip on the other side,” Knaus said.
“My wife drove through it the other day, and an old piece of fence that had been knocked off there to make the road was stuck in the side of her tire, flattened her tire. … I pulled up three other pieces of fence from underneath the torn up concrete that was in shambles. It’s down to that point.”
Roads on the short-term radar
Magner said that his department was looking at doing a base reclamation on Four Mile Ridge Road this year, in which a road is ground up, then repaved. A similar project was done on Hoover Road before it was repaved.
Paving Four Mile Ridge would cost close to $400,000 — nearly half of the local funding Magner intends to set aside for paving this year.
At the May 19 meeting, Magner also said he was looking at applying to pave Helmsburg and Clay Lick roads with Community Crossings grant funding in 2021. The county has a year and a half to use that grant money after receiving it.
“The goal with the grant money is to target our high-volume roads,” Magner said.
Other roads on Magner’s radar include Old State Road 46 going east out of town from the top of the hill past Snyder Road, and the Old 46 loop in Gnaw Bone, along with a couple more minor thoroughfare roads.
“This is not gospel yet,” he said.
The goal would be to package roads together that are near each other to avoid additional mobilization costs with contractors, Magner continued.
In the 2018-2020 road improvement plan, Magner listed an additional 24 roads that needed to be repaved, including Ford Ridge Road and Three Notch Road, along with “numerous other existing paved roads.”
“They are not in any particular order as far as priority goes. That is my next step, to group them. I will try to group them for next three years at least, then long-term,” he said.
When will my road be paved?
Firm dates have not been announced yet for 2021 paving.
Along with wet spring weather, contractors and resources going to the I-69 project in Morgan County are another reason why paving has been delayed.
Magner said that even though contractors have busy schedules, they have penciled Brown County in, “knowing we’re going to do more work this year, because they want our work,” he said.
Rainy spring weather delays paving because the road bases are wet and can be damaged further when dump truck after dump truck drive over them to bring materials in.
“To do a three-mile stretch of road, if you start running 150 trucks loaded in and go back out, you will destroy a good road, much less one with a soft base. It doesn’t do us any good to start early. We’re just going to do more damage than good. We will be on them as soon as we can,” Magner said at the May 19 meeting.
AllStar Paving has the contracts to pave the roads using the Community Crossings funding from last year, and they are ready to go once the roads dry up, Magner said. Depending on which part of the county dries up first, crews could start on either Becks Grove Road in the southern part of the county or Lick Creek Road in the northern part first.
Commissioners President Jerry Pittman said some residents do not understand “the big picture” when it comes to paving.
“Several people told me that we have the worst roads of any county in the state of Indiana. I said, ‘No that is not true. You think every road in Brown County is bad and that is not true.’ Half of our roads are in excellent condition because they have been paved in the last five years,” he said.
“We can’t pave every road this year. There’s not enough money or not enough time.”
He said his goal as commissioner would be to see every road in the county repaved by 2026.
“That would approximately be a 10-year period to pave every road in the county, then we would be in a position to start from there, then repave every 10 years,” he said.
Resident Kevin Fleming asked if it was possible that roads that had been repaved since 2015 may need attention before 10 years go by. “What is the life expectancy of a paved road?” he asked. No answer was given.
Sherman said that Sweetwater Trail, which was paved in 2014, was eroding. But Magner said the portion of the road near Petro Road had storm damage.
When asked if he would respond to concerned residents, Magner said they should first be nice to his crew.
“Before you want a response from me, quit badmouthing me on Facebook all the time,” he said.
“You started first cutting down myself and all of my crew. If you want a response from me, then be nice to my crew.”
