For the last five years, more than 20 miles of roads have been repaved each year, and the county is on track to continue that trend this year.
Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner announced at the Feb. 5 Brown County Commissioners meeting that he was applying for the first round of Community Crossings grant funding through the Indiana Department of Transportation.
He applied for $1 million to pave three county roads, for a total of 11 miles. The total cost of the work listed in the grant application was $1.5 million.
The grant requires a $333,000 match and the total cost of the project has to be $1.3 million or more to ensure the county receives the full $1 million, Magner explained. “If bids come in less (than $1.3 million) we will not get the full million,” he said.
All of Becks Grove Road is on the list to be paved with this money, along with the majority of Mt. Liberty Road from Bellsville Pike to Rinnie Seitz roads. About 2.4 miles of Lick Creek Road also will be paved from Cottonwood Church to State Road 45.
However, that’s not all certain yet because the county hasn’t received the grant money. Magner estimated that he’d know in March if the county is getting the full $1 million.
“At that point, we’ll be able to decide what we can do with local funds, because if we don’t get the grant, then we can do part of these (roads) with local funds. But if we do get the full grant, which we sure hope that we do, then that will open it up to a bigger chunk of roads we can do with our local money,” Magner said.
He did not share a list of his other priority potential roads for paving by deadline for this story.
“It’s always a moving target depending on whether we get grant money or not, what local funds are available and conditions of the roads depending on how we go through the winter,” he said.
Even though snow and ice have been lacking this winter compared to previous years, Magner said this winter’s wet and soggy conditions are not ideal for roads. “We’re getting a lot of road damage right now, plus rain damage a couple of weeks ago with leaves plugging up culverts and washing stuff out. That’s a continual cycle that changes the ratings every spring,” Magner said of his priority list.
At the meeting, Magner said that if the full grant is received this spring, then he’s looking at paving an additional 10 to 15 miles of road with local funds, which would make the total miles paved this year to between 21 and 26 miles.
Reaching goals
Around five years ago, Magner and the commissioners set a goal to pave 20 miles of county roads a year.
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. He restructured the budget. The county began taking out loans and started applying for Community Crossings grant funding.
“You all said I was crazy for (wanting) 20 miles a year,” commissioner Diana Biddle said at the Feb. 5 meeting.
Magner said paving roads in the county became a commitment and priority for his department. “We proved we can do it, and we’ll continue doing it every year if possible,” he said.
The county has 400 miles of roads, and about 220 of those are hard surfaces (not gravel).
The highway department has paved a little over 116 miles of the hard-surface roads in the past five years using Community Crossings money and local funding. He included Greasy Creek Road in that total, since it was funded under last year’s Community Crossings grant, but was not repaved before cold weather hit. It will be paved when the weather warms up.
“We still have a little under half that haven’t been worked on yet,” Magner said of the remaining hard surface roads.
“If someone calls to complain their road hasn’t been paved. We still have close to 100 miles of road that haven’t been upgraded yet,” he said.
Biddle said that paving 53-percent of the hard surface roads in the county in five years is “unprecedented.”
“For 2015 alone, we had over 70 miles of road that needed immediate attention. We’re still working on some of those roads five years later just because of the lack of funding to do them all at once,” Magner said.
“It has been a challenge, but we’ve made great headway.”
The highway department has been focusing on current hard-surface roads and has not converted any gravel roads to paved roads over the last five years. “People ask, ‘Why aren’t you paving our gravel roads?’ We still have today (Feb. 5) 100 miles of other paved roads that have not been brought up to where they should be before we lose them,” Magner explained.
To repave a road that has an existing solid base costs the county between $80,000 and $100,000 a mile. Magner said to convert a gravel road to pavement would cost at least twice that because it requires additional base work and multiple coats. Plus, it costs more to keep up paved roads.
At the February meeting, Magner said the National Center on Rural Road Safety has a training program coming out later this month that will address how to convert paved roads back to gravel. “It has gotten so expensive to pave, and a lot of people cannot do it,” he said.
If the highway department continues to pave more than 20 miles each year, all of hard-surface roads will be upgraded in about five years, which would then allow the department to look at possibly converting some gravel roads to pavement.
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, from the state Community Crossings grant program, and from the wheel tax you pay when you register vehicles in Brown County.
“As long as we have the commitment on (grant) funding to go forward, then that gets us to the point where some roads could be converted to paved roads from a gravel road,” Magner said.
“But you also have to look long term at, can you maintain that over the life of the road? That was the issue with a lot of roads we have right now. Why they are in such poor shape is they may have gone out initially 15 years ago and paved them, but then they didn’t have the budget to maintain them.”
Magner said on Feb. 5 that his department had run around 6,000 tons of gravel out to maintain gravel roads in the last couple of weeks.
Bridge work
Bridges are another piece of infrastructure the highway department will be looking at this year for repairs.
In 2018, 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 in 2018 that the total cost of that bridge work was likely to go down because some projects would be done locally and not to federal standards.
The county’s cumulative bridge fund for 2020 was adopted at $846,018. “That fund has not generated a lot of money for years, so we’ve been saving back on some of them,” Magner said.
Magner said the highway department is looking at two or three different bridge projects this year, but he did not elaborate what those projects were yet. This week Magner was supposed to meet and go over the draft for phase two of the county’s federally mandated countywide bridge inspection and set priorities.
There are other, bridge-like structures of less than a 20-foot span that also need repairs. They are considered culverts or “small structures,” so they are not included in the county’s official bridge inventory, and funding will be needed to make those repairs too, Magner explained.
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A petition to reduce the speed limit on West Robertson Road to 30 MPH is moving forward. The Brown County Commissioners plan to publish the change and have public hearings on it.
Brown County Highway Superintendent Mike Magner presented a draft ordinance to the commissioners at their Feb. 5 meeting. Countywide, the speed limit on county roads is 40 MPH unless otherwise posted.
The ordinance to change the speed limit on this road has to be published and have multiple readings, since it involves ticketing and fines if people are caught speeding.
The new speed limit would not go into effect until the commissioners vote on it and new speed limit signs are put up.
Resident Sherrie Mitchell petitioned for the speed limit reduction.
Anyone can make a request to lower speed limits, commissioner Diana Biddle explained.
Magner said he follows multiple guides and state standards when determining traffic rules and signage.
“A lot of it goes back to the condition of the road. Sight distance is a big one, the amount of traffic, if it’s a major thoroughfare or not. Someone could come in and say, ‘I want my roads reduced to 25 mph because I have young kids.’ Safety is a concern, but it’s not a justification for changing the speed limit on the whole road,” he said.
The vertical sight distance was a major factor as to why Magner decided to reduce this speed limit, he said.
“I think the deciding factor for me was it was just something that made common sense,” Biddle said.
“I’ve been back in that area and I know what that road is like. It’s a dead end, it’s not a thoroughfare, it’s got the sight distance, so it just kind of makes sense.”
Magner said his department was going to be looking at other dead-end and narrow roads as he updates the road inventory this year to see if more speed limit signs are necessary throughout the county.
Planning Director Chris Ritzmann wrote a letter on the behalf of the Board of Zoning Appeals in support of the speed limit reduction “because of the frequent use of the road by school buses, dump trucks, farm equipment and logging and utility trucks.”
The date for the public hearing on the first reading of the ordinance has not been announced yet.
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