From the Evansville Courier & Press:
You can come to Vanderburgh County’s annual roads hearing Thursday, but don’t expect a commitment for miles of repairs on that bumpy street near your home.
Declining revenue for local governments in Indiana will force the county to reduce — again — the amount of roadway it can repair during the April-to-September orange-barrel season.
In fact, this year you’ll be able to count the number of miles paved countywide on two hands.
“It’ll be a little less” than the 10 miles of base and surface repair work that crews did on
county-maintained roadways last year, said Highway Superintendent Mike Duckworth.
The number isn’t rock bottom, but it perpetuates a radical reduction years in the making.
In 2008, the nearly 22 miles of road the County Commissioners approved for base and surface repair was 26 percent less than the previous year’s total of more than 29 miles — which was down from 35 miles the year before that.
The reason? Declining gasoline tax, wheel tax and excise tax revenues — a long-standing problem for local governments that is by no means exclusive to Vanderburgh County.
“It’s continually depleting because gas prices have gone up and people drive less — and when people drive less they don’t spend as much at the pump, which means we don’t get the revenues,” Duckworth said.
Duckworth holds out hope that state legislators will appropriate more money for local roadwork, but as it stands now the amount available for paving amounts to $600,000 at most. Just five years ago, the figure was $1.1 million.
“It’ll mean we’ll have to do sections of road instead of miles,” Duckworth said. “So if the road is a mile long, we might end up doing just a quarter-mile of it because we’ll need to pick and choose the worst sections of roads.”
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See the full article here:
http://www.courierpress.com/news/2013/apr/01/no-headline---roads/
