At the Williamson County Highway Commission meeting on Wednesday, Mayor Rogers Anderson brought up a study on finding roads funding the county is rolling out, and mentioned how the press has not gotten hold of it yet.
Duly noted, Mayor.
The study came up as highway commissioners discussed how the county can fund some $150 million in road improvements over the next 14 years recommended by a recently presented traffic study.
“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 developers.”
It is still in the organizing phase, while the county decides on which outside consultant to hire to undertake the study. But the mayor and Matteson both said at the meeting that they hope to have results by March 2017.
Matteson, on Friday, explained why the county decided it needed a study.
“Traffic congestion within Williamson County as a whole continues to worsen due to rapid population and employment growth in the area,” said Matteson via e-mail on Friday. “While this growth is primarily occurring within the various municipalities located in the County, many roadways in the unincorporated County are also experiencing increased traffic volumes and congestion as a result of the growth that is taking place – both regionally as well as within the unincorporated areas of the County. In order to accommodate the projected growth, a number of roadways will need to be widened in the future.”
So, while the need for improvements is obvious, the source for their funding is not.
“Funding for these improvements is currently very limited, and there are limitations to bringing about meaningful roadway improvements through regulatory approaches alone,” wrote Matteson.
He is not kidding: 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 total proposed budget for the coming year lists $515 million in expenditures, with more than $300 million going to schools. The same budget lays out $11.5 million to the Highway/Public Works Department, with about $5.7 million of that allocated for highway and bridge work. So that earmarks about $19.2 million available in 2016-17 and beyond for road work, against $150 million in improvements called for by 2030.
The study, then, will look for ways to supplement its road work budget on one hand and find creative ways to quell traffic on the other.
“In order to deal with these issues in the most effective way possible, the County will be working with a consultant to evaluate current traffic conditions, project future traffic conditions, and develop a set of specific recommendations for how the County can best manage traffic within the unincorporated County in the future – both from a funding standpoint as well as from a regulatory standpoint,” Matteson wrote.
One such way, as suggested at the Wednesday meeting by highway commissioner Stan Tyson is to add some kind of development or traffic-added tax.
“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,” Tyson said. “Say, start with two cars per added household?”
The city of Franklin, for instance, already does something like this, calling it an Adequate Facilities Tax.
Matteson said the study will likely look at the possibility of an extraction from developers to help add funding.
The study will start this summer, and congeal in the coming weeks.
“When we get just a tiny bit further down the road, when we have a consultant identified and this takes more of a concrete shape I will be able to provide more details,” Matteson wrote Friday. “In the next week or two we ought to be able to do that.”
He said the county decided to conduct the study not specifically because of the results of the aforementioned traffic study.
“It is more just out of an understanding that traffic is an issue in Williamson County and will continue to be,” said Matteson. “We felt like a study of this nature would potentially give us some more tools than we have now to deal with traffic issues in the most effective way.”
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