Village Board Seeking New Funds for Road Repair

When it comes to maintaining streets, the trick is to keep up with their natural rate of decay, so you’re not trying to catch up while the roads crumble around you.

But as trustees were told last week, if the village keeps its street repair program going at its current rate, it will soon be hopelessly behind.

Village Engineer Pete Wallers delivered the news to the Committee of the Whole last week, and the numbers are sobering.

The village is currently in its second five-year street repair plan. There have been two recent studies of the village road system, in 2003 and 2008, ranking the streets that need attention most. But in between those two studies, the population exploded, and the system grew by more than 49 percent, adding almost 25 lane miles. The pavement condition index for the system is 80, considered “very good.”

In the eight years of the current road repair plan, the village has spent a total of about $5.5 million to resurface and reconstruct about 10 percent of their system.

Roughly $2.4 million of that money came from state and federal grants, and the remainder from motor fuel tax funds, shared by the state. Montgomery gets about $480,000 a year in those funds, but uses about $150,000 of it on snow removal and road salt purchases each year.

That leaves about $330,000 for road repair, plus whatever grant money village leaders can find. They’ve been good at finding it, though—in 2010, the village spent more than $1.5 million on street repair, and in 2011 about $765,500. Wallers said they were awarded more grant money than they expected over the past two years, and have been able to get ahead of the five-year plan somewhat.

Trouble is, according to Wallers, it’s not enough.

The 2008 study recommended an annual expense of $2.2 million a year, to keep up with the decay of roads in the system. Wallers said that’s probably about right—at current, the village repairs and resurfaces about 1.5 percent of its roads each year, and to keep up, it would need to complete four to five percent.

Or, put another way, it’s recommended that roads are resurfaced or reconstructed once every 20 to 25 years. If the village continues at its current rate, Montgomery roads will be overlaid once every 65 years.

Further complicating the situation is the newer construction to the west of Orchard Road. Those subdivisions were largely built during the population boom of the last half-decade, and many of their streets will need repair at the same time. Wallers said that time could start within the next five to 10 years.

Resurfacing, Wallers said, costs about half as much as completely reconstructing a road, so it’s imperative that the village keep up with the decay. Wallers said preventive maintenance is key, but so is finding new sources of funding, a definite issue during the current economic downturn, when the village budget remains tight.

Montgomery is still paying off its investment in the new and the new , and it will be 2020 before those funds become available. The Mill Street Bridge is due to be inspected next year, and routine maintenance, if needed, is expected to cost between $300,000 and $400,000.

And next up on the village’s capital projects list is a digital dispatch system for the police department, which is costly, but by law must be in place by January 1, 2013, according to Chief Daniel Meyers.

The need to find more funds for road repair led Trustee Stan Bond to suggest using all of the motor fuel tax funds on streets, and moving the annual road salt purchase to another part of the budget. However, doing that this year, as Bond suggested, would mean cutting $160,000 from another part of the budget, and his fellow trustees voted down that idea.

Instead, village leaders will look at moving that expense in the 2013 budget, and will use motor fuel tax funds to buy salt for the upcoming winter.

Trustee Denny Lee balked at the entire issue, calling it “busy work to keep the staff busy.”

“We have a balanced budget, so what’s the problem?” he said.

“The budget may be balanced, but there are still some concerns that need to be addressed,” Bond said in response.

In the end, raising sales taxes may be one of the board’s options to bring in more funds. In order to do that, village leaders would have to place a referendum on an upcoming ballot. Trustee Bill Keck brought up the possibility at last week’s meeting, but no further discussion ensued.

Village President Marilyn Michelini called the numbers “a real eye-opener.”

“Now we know what we’re faced with,” she said.