The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Officials: More money needed
Street repairs outpace available funding
There are no problems on Lorain County roads that couldn’t be fixed with a little more money.
Or sometimes a lot more money, said local officials and engineers that specialize in street repairs.
Lorain County communities each year create multi-million dollar budgets for roadwork. But in most communities, the condition of the streets and the residents’ demands outpace the dollars available.
“I don’t know what the answer is, but that’s one of the challenges: The road program is always
underfunded,” said Lorain City Engineer Dale Vandersommen. “You do the math. We just have a lot of pavement in the city and not a lot of road funding.”
Lorain has 265.7 miles of pavement on the city, said Vandersommen and Deputy Director of Engineering Daniel Rodriguez. Stretched out end to end, they are longer than the 241-mile Ohio Turnpike.
The city spends about $2.5 million a year on road rebuilding and relatively large resurfacing projects. The money comes from the Ohio Public Works Commission and loans from the Ohio State Infrastructure Bank.
“As far as other funding sources, there’s not many,” Vandersommen said.
That $2.5 million is a lot of money, the city engineers said. But based on the life cycle of the pavement, Lorain could spend more than $14.37 million a year on a regular schedule of replacing streets, they said.
Lorain voters in 2012 approved Issue 13, a half-percent income tax increase that paid for a number of street projects. The city still is paying for those improvements.
Around Lorain County
North Ridgeville has a levy on the books that raises about $1.4 million a year for road repairs and street equipment, said Mayor G. David Gillock.
This year the city will spend about $900,000 on paving; $300,000 of that is matching money for paving projects planned by the Ohio Department of Transportation, which will spend an estimated $400,000, Gillock said.
The city will spend about $250,000 on concrete pad repair, which is more maintenance work than new construction or major reconstruction, Gillock said.
Amherst has a street levy on the books that raises about $1 million a year for repairs and equipment, said Mayor Mark Costilow. The city paved about 10 streets in 2016 and hope to do about the same this year, he said.
Vermilion voters in 2013 approved an income tax levy for street repairs and last year City Council voted to change Vermilion’s tax credit forgiveness, generating about $600,000 a year for the streets.
Council this year debated on how to spend about $350,000 in unappropriated money; just four projects around the city had estimated costs of $656,000.
“Vermilion has about the same amount of money as other municipalities of our size,” said Ward 3 Councilman Jim Forthofer, who is chairman of Council’s Streets, Buildings & Grounds Committee.
“The problem is that our roads are so bad,” he said. “For years, Vermilion was unable to raise the taxes necessary to keep up with road repair. In that time the streets deteriorated.”
Now the city is left with “badly eroded roads” and an uphill challenge of catching up with repairs, Forthofer said.
Elyria musters about $350,000 a year — again, a lot of money, but proportionally not that much for a city of about 55,000 people, said City Engineer Timothy Ujvari.
Elyria voters in May 2016 approved a five-year, halfpercent income tax that will raise about $1.5 million a year for roadway improvement.
The city will have a Phase One implementation for street projects this year costing about $1.2 million. The city will advertise for bids by early April for spring construction, Ujvari said.
Elyria’s city engineers are design the projects in-house to keep costs down, and use any remaining levy money for more streets, he said.
Road miles don’t always paint the true picture of needs, Ujvari said, because that measurement does not necessarily account for needed repairs under the streets.
For example, a relatively short, full-depth repair to rebuild a street from the ground up, could cost as much as a top coat of pavement spread out over a longer distance.
Feds, ODOT, county
Road money is not just a Lorain County issue.
The Ohio Department of Transportation has an average budget of $2.33 billion a year. ODOT District 3, which oversees Lorain County, has a construction contract budget ranging from $90 million to $120 million a year, said ODOT spokeswoman Crystal Neelon.
The agency gets its money from the federal and state gas tax, she said.
A 2016 report by the Congressional Budget Office found federal gas tax revenues were “insufficient to pay for federal spending on highways.”
As construction costs have gone up, buying power has gone down, meaning “total federal spending on highways buys less now than at any time since the early 1990s,” according to the CBO report.
That holds true at the local level, said Bob Klaiber, assistant county engineer for Lorain County Engineer Ken Carney’s Office.
“The general problem that you see with the highway funding is, it’s flat,” Klaiber said.
In 2006, the Lorain County Engineer’s Office had gas and vehicle tax revenues of about $7.01 million. That money pays for road maintenance, repairs, equipment, salaries and matches for federal grants.
Since then, that figure has varied, dipping to a low of $6.39 million in 2013, then ticking up to $6.96 million in 2015.
In the same time period, costs have gone up, according to the county engineer’s figures.
Hot mix asphalt that sold for $105 a cubic yard in 2006 was $138 a cubic yard in 2015. Limestone aggregate that was $10.90 a ton in 2006 sold for $17 a ton in 2015.
A one-ton dump truck that sold for $29,871 in 2006 had a sticker price of $37,572 in 2016. A tractor with a roadside mower that sold for $43,397 in 2006 was priced at $63,330 in 2016, according to figures from the county engineer’s office.
“That’s the struggle — it’s getting funding,” Klaiber said.