The Greene County secondary roads budget for Fiscal Year 2018 calls for total expenditures of $5,776,000. The secondary road fund balance at the end of FY 18 is projected at $836,000, a decrease of $35,000 from the fund balance projected at the end of the current fiscal year.
County engineer Wade Weiss presented his FY 18 budget to the county supervisors Feb. 9 meeting. The proposed budget includes $145,000 for roadside management, which has previously been separate from secondary roads. Weiss took over roadside management duties several years ago but the budgets have not been separated.
Total expenditures will increase $293,000 compared to the current year.
The budget includes $549,000 for work on the County Road E-57 bridge west of Highway 4. Work on the bridge was planned for two years from now, but Weiss moved it to the coming construction season after the bridge was damaged in an accident last fall. “We’re working diligently to get the bids let by July so we can get construction done yet this year,” Weiss told the supervisors.
He said E-57 was laid in 1957 and is “in OK shape,” but he plans to do some concrete patching while the road is closed to through traffic for the bridge work.
Roadway maintenance will include work on the “St Mary’s bridge” in Franklin Township, and culverts in Franklin Township and south of Scranton. Weiss plans to replenish supplies of white rock and gravel, spending $419,000 on gravel. He said the department used 5,000 tons of white rock during the January thaw, in addition to gravel. Weiss has budgeted $222,000 for snow and ice control. That budget line item during the current and the next fiscal year is building a stockpile from sand available locally.
Weiss plans to spend $360,000 building two new trucks. He noted that two Greene County trucks will be displayed at the National Snow Conference for county engineers in Des Moines in April.
There is no money in the budget for a new building to replace the space lost with the sale of the former armory to Greene County Schools. He plans to put up a shell in Scranton for temporary storage and rolling stock (such as maintainers) will be stored at the fairgrounds during the winter. He expects to do that the next one or two years.
He will spend $300,000 in clean-up at the Jefferson shop location where a leaking underground storage tank was removed. The cost will be reimbursed by the state’s leaking underground storage tank (LUST) fund.
The budget calls for $1,105,000 in property tax revenue from the rural levy and another $50,000 from the county-wide levy. The local option sales tax (LOST) will add $325,000. State road use tax revenue is anticipated at $2,952,000, a slight decrease from the current year. The sale of the armory ($250,000) is included as miscellaneous revenue.
The supervisors and county auditor Jane Heun have been working on the FY18 budget since December. They will finalize the proposed budget with levy rates at their Feb. 23 meeting. The public hearing on the budget will be held March 13 at 9 am.
The secondary roads budget is typically between 40 and 45 percent of the total county budget.
