Investing in county roads

A day trip to Richmond 

FRITZ MAYER
Posted 1/18/17

MONTICELLO, NY — Ed McAndrew, the commissioner of the Sullivan County Division of Public Works, gave a presentation to the county legislature on January 12 that contained a lot of information …

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Investing in county roads

A day trip to Richmond 

Posted

MONTICELLO, NY — Ed McAndrew, the commissioner of the Sullivan County Division of Public Works, gave a presentation to the county legislature on January 12 that contained a lot of information about the county-owned road system.

He showed a graphic that represented the amount of money the county spent on its roads dating back to the 1980s. In some years, the spending has been enough to get a bit ahead of the ongoing practice of paving and treating roads, but in a majority of years, the spending has not been enough to keep the county from falling behind.

McAndrew said that there are currently 385 miles of two-lane county roads, and currently about 100 miles need to be repaved. He said that’s better than some years in the past, because more money has been invested in the past two years, but he would like to see that number drop to about 35 miles per year.

His main point, however, was that waiting to fix a road once the damage and wear gets beyond a certain point increases the cost of the repair by a factor of four or five. He said county roads generally last 12 to 15 years. But if they are left to be repaved for another two years, the cost quickly escalates, because the base and sub-base must also be replaced.

He said, “That’s when I come up and say, ‘We can pave now for $250,000 a mile or we can wait a few years and spend $500,000, $600,000, $700,000 a mile in order to repair the road.’”

McAndrew said that if all of the county roads in Sullivan County were laid out end to end, a person could drive from Sullivan County to Richmond VA.

He said, “It’s a seven hour trip. We have 400 bridges on that road system; you’re going to cross a county bridge every minute on your way from here to Richmond, VA. We carry approximately 2,500 culverts, so you’re going to cross a county culvert every 10 seconds. These are some of the costs and why they are so high. There will be guard rails along that road, ditches along that road, there will be brush clearing along that roadway.”

He said that most county roads started out as “horse to market trails,” and were taken over by towns that just put some asphalt on top, so in many cases issues such as drainage and sub-bases were never properly addressed.

The DPW is in the process of coming up with this year’s plan for addressing county roads. McAndrew said ideally a road should be paved, then surface treated at five years, surface treated again at 10 years, and repaved at 15 years. Surface treatment costs $25,000 per mile.

The message was that it is expensive to maintain county roads, but even more expensive not to. He said he tries not to present this information as bad news, “but I just want to make you aware that when we fall off on investing in the roads, the impacts are drastic in very short order when we have to start rebuilding roads.”

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