Merger of Evansville, Vanderburgh County road departments would raise questions

Each government's engineers' offices plus the county Highway Department and city Department of Transportation and Services — which already oversees six subdepartments — would be wrapped up into a single agency.

As if to demonstrate the scale of the proposed changes, the Plan of Reorganization adopted by city and county governing bodies last year describes consolidations within a consolidation.

"The City Engineer and County Engineer shall be combined into one office and there shall be one office of Engineer for the Combined Government. The office of Engineer and the County Highway Garage shall be combined into the (existing city) Division of Transportation Services, resulting in a Department of Transportation Services in the Combined Government."

What the plan lacks is any guidance beyond that.

Ed Hafer Jr., a member of the 12-member citizens committee that crafted a proposal for consolidation, said members ultimately decided it would be inappropriate for the details to be decided by unelected and thus unaccountable residents.

"We felt that those are decisions that are best left to the members of government that are elected directly by the people," Hafer said.

Mike Duckworth, the county's highway superintendent, said such decisions would have to be made with a sophisticated understanding of the various agencies' equipment, manpower and budgets so they could be effectively blended — plus an appreciation for the differences in city and county road terrain.

Duckworth, who also has served as head of city government's Division of Transportation Services, said the two agencies do "completely different" roadwork.

The city's street maintenance department has crews that do some sidewalk and minor concrete repair and patching of potholes. The city engineer's office contracts out capital improvements to streets and drainage systems and other infrastructure.

By contrast, the county highway department does most of the county's road resurfacing work using two pavers, with county engineers contracting out bridge replacement and culvert repair projects that highway crews cannot do. Among the larger projects that have been contracted out: design and construction of University Parkway and road widening on Green River Road.

City and county equipment needs are different, Duckworth said, because of the vast differences in city and county roadway.

Of the 540 miles of primarily long and winding county-maintained roadway, only about 20 are curbed streets. There's not much need for curb replacement in areas outside the city other than minor repairs in newer subdivisions.

City streets involve a lot more starting and stopping for the motorist. There are more multi-laned roads with curbed streets, more intersections and substantially more traffic signals and sidewalks.

"It's different in the county because of runoff. There's not a drainage system other than ditches, so we have to maintain ditches. The city has a sewer system, and on most of our county roads, the drainage rolls off the pavement onto the ditches and on down to the creeks," Duckworth said.

County crews are frequently called upon to clear banks of brush and trees growing out of wooded areas that hinder motorists' visibility on curved roads. The work requires motorized excavators that can reach over ditches to get to the banks. County crews also use the equipment to go deep into ditches to remove small trees and brush that otherwise would obstruct drainage and water flow.

The city has just one older motorized excavator. Duckworth said the city sometimes contracts with the county highway department to do paving and other work such as cutting ditches and banks.

"Even in between snows, we are ditching, we are handling trees," he said. "You don't have that kind of work inside the city. You don't have a lot of trees that fall in the middle of your streets, like we do. It happens every week, sometimes in the middle of the night, and we have to go out."

Precisely how all of the city and the county's manpower and equipment would be combined in a consolidated government is unknown. Some insight can be gleaned from the work of the Evansville-Vanderburgh County Reorganization Committee in 2010, when subcommittees of the 12-member citizens committee proposed more specific ideas.

H. Ray Hoops, chairman of the infrastructure subcommittee, said then that a merger could produce a more efficient mix of self-paving and contracting.

"Then you could use (former county Highway Department crews) for as much as they could do, for projects that would be optimal for their capabilities, before contracting out to (private contractors)," Hoops said. "You get better coordination."

Duckworth would want to know whether county crews would be called upon to pave formerly city-maintained streets.

"It's just a different way of paving, when you have to match your paving up to the curbing," he said. "We don't have any big milling machines, so we may have to say that we mill down a city street so we can get the paver in there and pave it. We may have to contract out the milling and then we would do the paving.

"All that has to be worked out as to how we can best use our tax dollars to get the most out of those material costs and not reduce services to people out in the county. That's going to be the challenge."