16 miles of roads to be resurfaced

Some Lawrence County roads could see improvements starting as early mid-October.

Lawrence County Engineer Patrick D. Leighty said his office is working on finalizing contracts to pave approximately 16 miles of roads this fall.

“I’m going to have a pre-construction meeting on it next week,” he said. “Then I will know more about when they are expecting to mobilize. I figure it will be later in October.”

The roads in the County Road Improvements 2017 include County Roads 65, 66, and 71; and the County Township Joint Resurfacing 2017 which included Aid Township Road 244E, Decatur Township Road 326, Fayette Township Roads 1154, 276S, 1153, 1425, 1013, and 1030, Lawrence Township Road 274, Perry Township Road 268, Union Township Roads 1010, 1288, and 1289, Windsor Township Road 309, and County Road 171.

“These projects will resurface roads that do not meet the classification to receive federal funding and will improve travel on some of our roads within the county,” Leighty said. His office figures out which county roads need fixed first by what condition the roads are in and when they were last paved. “We can’t do a whole lot because there isn’t a whole lot of money in the grants.”

Township trustees pick which township roads are included in the grant.

Leighty said it costs roughly $100,000 per mile to resurface a road.

“It depends on how wide the road is, some roads are not as wide. So it can be around $60,000 a mile,” he said. “But we usually budget between $90,000 and $100,000 a mile. Once we figure out which roads we are paving and how wide they are, we can get a better number using a cubic yardage figure.”

Leighty said they only have a $4.2 million budget for everything, including salaries, equipment, paving, maintenance, road salt and snow removal.

“When you look at that, it is not a whole lot of money to do everything we need to do,” he said, adding that his office has the same funding level as 10 years ago. “But the cost of everything has gone up since then, it’s gone up about 15 percent. So we can only do less.”