Posted: 12:00 a.m.
Sunday, Dec. 28, 2014
Politics, funding put speed bumps in street
repairs
By http://www.journal-news.com/staff/michael-d-pitman/" rel="nofollow - - Ed Richter
Staff Writer
BUTLER COUNTY —
Cities and townships in Butler County
are looking at ways they can provide the road resurfacing services to their
residents with limited funding sources.
Millions of dollars are invested annually
into the county’s roadways. However, the funding supply doesn’t meet the demand
of repair — especially in Butler County’s two largest cities, Hamilton
and Middletown
— which continues to rise in a time where government budgets and funding
sources are shrinking.
The Butler County Engineer’s Office is
charged with paving the roadways of all the townships in the county. Over the
past 11 years has spent an annual average of $6.5 million in capital projects
and $1.48 million in paving projects and maintain 268 centerline miles of
roadway in Butler
County.
And while 96 percent of Butler County
roads maintained by the engineer’s office are considered to be at least in
“fair” condition — and 24 percent is considered to be rated “excellent” — the
engineer’s office, like just about every other government entity, is behind in
paving.
“Our biggest struggle with maintenance
currently is paving,” said Butler County Engineer Greg Wilkens, who added the
county has 4.4 million square yards of pavement under his responsibility.
Right now, the engineer’s office will
address paving issues for county roads in a 26-year cycle. But the standard is
15 years, Wilkens said, and that will take an additional $1.1 million a year in
today’s dollars to accomplish that.
All county-maintained roads, however, won’t
necessarily received full repaving — which means 2 to 3 inches of asphalt will
be replaced — but rather some will receive a chip seal, which is essentially
“waterproofing” the roads by adding a thin layer of asphalt and fine gravel.
Wilkens said that will extend the life of the roadway, but won’t add the
stability that repaving offers.
About 25 percent of the roads in the
county’s control has less than 1,000 average daily traffic counts, and any
roadway under that threshold will receive a chip seal treatment.
“We
would prefer to apply asphalt to every road,” Wilkens said. “However, due to
cost and budget, that’s not possible.”
Currently the county engineer’s paving
budget is approximately $1.5 million.
The city of Hamilton budgets $2.25 million to repave
about 3 miles of its 250 centerline miles each year, and according to Public
Works Director Richard Engle, it would cost about $100 million to bring every
road in the city up to a “fair” condition this year.
Just more than $1 million of that funding
comes from state grant sources, including the Ohio Public Works Commission and
Community Development Block Grant funds. About $700,000 is budgeted in the
city’s infrastructure renewal fund — whose funds stem from customer utility
fees and taxes from special license plates and electric usage — $200,000 comes
from the stormwater fund, which is used solely to repair and replace curbs
associated with catch basins, and about $300,00 is assessed to the property
owner whose street is being repaired for sidewalk and curb replacement.
Some of Hamilton’s street issues lie
underneath the surface, as the ground base on the east side is gravel while
west side streets lie on clay, and on the latter, a proper subgrade was not
originally made, which enables more water to seep through the pavement and
freeze, melt and expand, causing pot holes and other street deficiencies.
“The thing that destroys pavement the
fastest is having water trapped between the pavement and the subgrade,” Engle
said.
Between 2000 and 2008, the Department of
Public Works received less than $2 million annually to repave the roads. After
2008, more money was requested.
About 50 percent of Hamilton’s roads received a score of 50 or
less on the Pavement Condition Index
— the standard measuring system — and should be completely reconstructed, Engle
said. About 20 percent received a score of 51 to 70 PCI, a “fair” condition
where an asphalt overlay may suffice to keep the road in working condition, and
about 30 percent are determined to be in “good” condition, where preventative
maintenance could extend the pavement life considerably.
The city also follows a schedule to
determine which roads will be repaved each year, which is why some of Hamilton’s worst roads
may not be addressed immediately, Engle said. The cities’ top five worst roads
are Corwin Avenue,
Carlisle Avenue,
River Road, Laurel Avenue, and Hooven Avenue, according to city workers.
Public Works also works closely with the
Utility Department when determining which roads to pave, and coordinates with
utility projects to keep from tearing streets up multiple times. That’s why River Road remains
in disrepair even as it’s arguably the street Engle receives the most
complaints about.
“There is a utility project that needs to
be done before we do work on River
Road, and we don’t have the resources at the
moment to do it,” he said.
Jean
Bryant, 85, has lived on Carlisle
Street since 1963, and said she can never remember
her road being repaired.
“All they do is patch them up,” she said,
adding that when the city built a bridge overpass over Two Mile Creek in 1998, “that was the worst
thing they could have done.”
“This was supposed to be a neighborhood for
children, and it’s so dangerous,” she said.
Middletown
officials also have many of the same challenges that Hamilton faces as both communities grapple on
how to cover the growing costs to build or maintain streets and roads.
City
Manager Doug Adkins said there are several reasons that include a charter
amendment that removed the required allocation of income tax going directly to
capital improvements that was repealed in the 1980s; annexations through the
years have created more pavement to maintain; and many of the city’s roadway
systems were designed for higher traffic levels and a larger number of
residents. He said there were some past estimates projecting Middletown’s population to have more than
60,000 residents. According to the 2010 Census, Middletown’s population was about 49,000
residents.
As a result of long national economic
expansion during the 1980s, inflation started to increase prompting the Federal
Reserve to raise interest rates from 1986 to 1989. Middletown
felt that pain as the city’s income tax receipts were decreasing as a result of
job reductions, including the moving of Armco Steel’s headquarters to New Jersey the year
before. City officials were also grappling with other budget issues concerning
personnel and other municipal programs and needs. The slow economy wasn’t
helping the city, either, and in 1986, the city was facing the the loss of $1
million from its budget as a result of the federal government ending the
revenue sharing program, according to a Middletown Journal story.
However, the city’s infrastructure,
specifically the streets, was in fairly good shape back nearly 30 years ago.
In order to avert projected budget deficits
for 1987 and 1988, the Middletown City Commission had two options: seek a 0.5
percent income tax hike and the charter change was needed to avert projected
budget deficits for 1987 and 1988. In The Journal reported there was no real
opposition when residents voted in May 1986 to repeal the income tax split
provision from the 1960s that required that one-half of the city income tax
receipts would cover capital improvements, such as street repairs, in exchange
for raising the city income tax rate from 1 percent to 1.5 percent.
City commissioners at the time feared the
negative impact to development if they sought an income tax hike and had
intended the reallocation as a short-term fix as well as seeking an income tax
increase at a later date. At that time, commissioners said they intended to
keep street maintenance level at their current levels. The street program
slowed once the federal revenue sharing dried up.
Voters later rejected tax levies of 0.25
percent in 1997 and in 2004 for street improvements. In 2006, voters also
rejected a proposed 0.75 percent increase where a portion of the revenues would
be used, but not required to be spent on streets and other infrastructure.
Council considered putting a streets levy on the ballot in 2008, but decided
against it opting later to have a 0.25 percent income tax increase for public
safety which voters later made it a permanent increase. The current income tax
rate is 1.75 percent.
“One mil of city property tax goes for
capital improvements,” Adkins said. This equals about $620,000 for 2014. Most
of this is used towards road improvements. A small portion is used for traffic
signal system replacements, pavement striping, misc. building and park
repairs.”
While
it varies from year to year, Adkins said the city also receives federal
Community Development Block Grant
through Butler County as well as General Fund revenues
from the generation of city income tax. The city also has outside funding
sources for road improvements include Ohio Public Works Commission grants,
federal infrastructure grants through the Ohio-Kentucky-Indiana Regional
Council of Governments, and the Ohio Department of Transportation’s Urban
Paving Program for state routes.
In 2014, the city received about $2.2
million in auto and gas tax funds are used street maintenance, which includes
labor, material, and equipment costs for the street maintenance crew, he said.
Add in the outside and grant funding that total grows to about $4.2 million for
road improvements in 2014.
There is no reimbursement for maintaining
state routes through the city, but ODOT does provide funding for major
resurfacing projects on those routes through the Urban Paving Program, said
Scott Tadych, public works and utilities director. He said the state typically
pays about 80 percent of the asphalt costs.
Other city departments such as water, sewer
and stormwater provide some additional funding when it’s appropriate to
replace/repair pavement associated with these types of infrastructure projects,
Adkins said.
Middletown
has about 220 center line miles of streets to maintain and its estimated in
2008 to cost more than $120 million, not adjusted to inflation, Tadych said. He
said every two years the city conducts a PCI and expects to have a better
estimate later in 2015 after then next PCI is conducted.
“The city would not ‘catch up’ with $2
million a year over 60 years,” Adkins said. “More funds per year over a shorter
timeframe would be needed.”
About every two years, the city does a PCI
where each street is evaluated block by block. In 2013 PCI, the average score
of city streets was at 57 out of a possible score of 100. Of those streets, the
2013 PCI scored 35 percent of the streets in good condition, 18 percent were in
fair condition and 47 percent were in poor condition, Tadych said.
According to the city’s PCI, the worst
streets, rated at failure, are portions of Wisconsin Street, Water Street,
Vermont Street, Cherry Street, Creekview Drive and
two portions of Sheffield Street.
Tadych said Creekview Drive’s
rating will increase as it was recently repaved.
The city has 38 streets rated at 100
percent based on the 2013 PCI.
Adkins told City Council during his job
interview last summer that the current system was not working and something had
to change. He said the $2 million budgeted for 2014 had no supporting reasoning
as it did not identify the number of lane miles, the cost per lane mile, which
lanes are to be paved and how did that meet city objectives.
“The process of appropriating $2 million
for paving in 2014 is completely different process from developing an ongoing
sustainable paving program,” he wrote. “One is emptying bank accounts, the
other is building sustainable capacity.”
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