Road department takes cuts

By Holli Keaton (Contact) | Troy Messenger

Published Wednesday, October 28, 2009

The Pike County Road Department managed to make it through the budget year without increasing its debt.

But, it wasn’t without some tight spending restrictions, minimal staffing and even selling its own equipment.

Now, in a year coming off those hardships, the road department will take a bigger hit in its federal gas tax funding, said County Engineer Russell Oliver.

Oliver announced at Monday’s Pike County Commission meeting, the department would only receive $339,000 in federal funds this year, where it typically earns $533,000.

It was incorrectly reported in the Oct. 27 edition of The Messenger those amounts would remain the same as they had the previous year.

However, Oliver said for the first time since 1995, the local road department will earn less than it ever has in federal funding, in a time where all other costs are on the rise.

“It concerns me very much,” Oliver said. “We need just the opposite. We need more of this money because we can’t accomplish as much as we used to could accomplish with the same amounts of money.”

The funds Oliver said the road department receives at the federal level are about a fifth of the total revenues for the year.

The money will be rewarded now, but Oliver said the road department will have a year and a half to decide how to spend those funds.

It also comes with some restrictions.

“We have to match it 20 percent, and it can only be used on certain roads for certain projects,” Oliver said.

Some examples of how this money has been used in the past were to resurface Needmore Road, County Road 2276 and County Road 3327.

“Those are some of the more recent projects that were funded with this federal aid,” Oliver said.

But, even with federal funds, these projects are costly.

“To put it in perspective, we had to save up two years of federal aid allotments to resurface eight miles of Needmore Road,” Oliver said. “It really just depends on what we’re doing to (how far the money will go).”

Oliver said the amount the local road department has received each year has remain unchanged, with a slight exception.

Since 1995 the funding has been $500,000 each year, but last year, the state increased that amount to $533,000.

This was to offset project costs the state implemented on local road departments.

“The typical indirect costs are usually more than $33,000, so the net effect is actually a reduction in the money we have to spend on road work,” Oliver said.

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