Roads are crumbling all over Lawrence County. Thanks to Mother Nature’s barrage last month, it’s only getting worse. And there never seems to be enough money coming in to keep up with repairs.
Earlier this week, it was “road day” at the Statehouse. County officials from across Indiana came to ask legislators for more money to fix roads and bridges.
The case isn’t a hard one to make.
Declining funding for local governments is making it difficult to maintain their 85,000 miles of roads and 12,000 bridges. And in Lawrence County, we know the feeling.
It costs about $70,000 to pave 1-1/2 miles of roads, depending on the price of asphalt. Lawrence County has more than 700 miles of roads to maintain, and even if we are lucky enough to have the money to pave 40 miles each year, it’s going to take nearly 20 years to resurface the entire county.
“There’s no pain-free way to solve this,” Stephanie Yager, who heads the Indiana Association of County Commissioners, said during the Statehouse rally.
“But it’s not pain-free to ride down a road that’s full of potholes.”
Even the Local Option Highway User Tax, commonly referred to as the wheel tax, which is imposed on every driver in Lawrence County, can’t make up the difference.
In 2013, the General Assembly allocated an extra $65 million a year for local governments to make road repairs. The proposed state budget now under debate maintains that funding, which adds about $300,000 to Lawrence County’s paving budget.
According to a recent story filed by the CNHI Statehouse Bureau, the increase was intended to help make up for declining dollars from the gas tax. Gas tax proceeds have fallen — due largely to more fuel-efficient vehicles — to about $500 million a year from almost $700 million a decade ago.
But that extra money barely made a dent in the need. Locally, it accounted for about eight additional miles of paving each year, Lawrence County Highway Superintendent David Holmes noted in a previous newspaper story.
A Purdue University study in 2009 estimated that local governments need more than $5 billion just to bring roads and bridges up to federal safety standards.
A state-funded survey last year echoed those findings. And that doesn’t include $4 billion that the state Department of Transportation says it needs just to repair state’s aging highways and bridges, which make up just a fraction of the total road infrastructure, according to the bureau.
But to gain more funding for roads, Hoosier taxpayers would have to foot the bill through higher taxes. And although we want better roads, we are reticent to fork over money to make it happen.
“Sixty-five percent of Hoosiers think roads need to be maintained better. Thirty-five percent are willing to pay for it,” said House Transportation Chairman Ed Soliday, R-Valparaiso, who was citing a private House poll of voters.
Clearly, there is no easy answer for now, but we hope it starts with legislators maintaining road funding in the new two-year state budget.
In the meantime, it’s time for the state to sit down with local leaders to develop a sustainable plan that will benefit local drivers without taxing the system.