They don’t know exactly how, yet, but it is clear that the county leadership believes it must find a way to pay for a road improvement plan.
Last month, at the June Highway Commission Meeting, engineers from RPM Traffic Consultants presented their findings from a traffic study.
The study looked at four major corridors- Sneed Road, Clovercroft Road, Lynnwood Way/South Berrys Chapel Road, Arno Road and Henpeck Lane- with projected growth through 2030. It estimated the total cost at about $150 million.
It concluded that certain- listed- improvements needed to happen shorterm (by 2020) and longterm (by 2030) for traffic to remain at a servicably acceptable, and safe, level as the county’s population and traffic grows.
The commissioners took no action on the plan last month, and likewise took none on Wednesday. However, they plan to start getting to work on the advisements at their August meeting.
Wednesday’s meeting dealt, in general terms, with funding the projects in the draft report. It functioned, de facto, as a brainstorming session wherein the commissioners asked how the projects might be funded and County Mayor Rogers Anderson answered. The August meeting, the commission concurred, would take some steps toward specific action.
“This is a very aggressive plan, and we would like to not have to borrow any money if we can,” Anderson said. “We are sure on the first five or six years of this- we need to figure out a way to pay for it out of our taxes, fees and fund balances. We have been building up our fund balance to tackle some of these problems, to fund them without borrowing money.”
At the end of the fiscal year 2016, which ended on July 1, the Highway/Public Works Department had an estimated fund balance of about $13.5 million. The proposed 2016-17 budget adds another $11.5 million to the Highway/Public Works Department, with about $5.7 million of that allocated for highway and bridge work.
The draft plan estimates that the 19 projects recommended for the 2020 plan will cost about $23.7 million. The 2030 plan, of course, contains a much larger number of projects, 84, with an estimated cost of an additional $128.7 million.
“Longterm, with the growth that we have, with the projected doubling of our population by 2040, I do not know that we have any other choice,” Anderson told the commission. “It is very ambitious, very noteworthy, but we just have to know how we are going to pay for it.”
He said that because the study assumed all of the work would be outsourced to subcontractors, that will help some in the cost analysis.
The Highway Department, said highway superintendent Eddie Hood, has 75 employees and equipment to help with the work, but at the same time they have other, regular work that this would potentially take them away from.
“To me, this is a wish list,” Stan Tyson, commissioner for the Northwest District, said to the mayor. “And, you said, if we do not have the funding and do not now where it is going to come from then we are dead in the water. What about, with any developer who is going to come into the county, if they are going to add cars, they ought to pay for it. Say, start with two cars per added household.”
The mayor responded by saying the county is currently undertaking a study to, among other things, look into just that.
“There are roadway improvements that are necessary to our longterm transportation plan, but there is not a lot of funding set up to help with that,” said Mike Matteson, planning director. “Over the next nine months we will be working with a consultant to identify some funding sources for these roadway improvements, that likely will include some sort of extraction from these developers.”
He said the plan/study will be completed most likely by March of 2017.
“Be prepared next month to really pull up our sleeves and get into the weeds on this on financial modeling that we can do,” said Anderson. “It is going to take some time for us to put priorities together and get to this work- it will probably be spring of 2017 before we can start to get any of this done. But the longer we delay the worse it is going to get. I do want to emphasize that we have got to be able to pay for this. I would like to think that-and I hear you, Stan, it is a wishlist- but this is a roadmap to get some of these problems solved that we have got in our unincorporated areas. And I think the cities and the state will work with us, because it helps them just like it helps us. But most of all we owe it to the citizens to be able to get back and do it in a safe manner.”
“I would be totally surprised, and I am not ever surprised anymore in politics, if the public said they did not want us to do this. At the end of the day you have to have safe roads.”
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