Lake County road work project needs public vote
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With 1,200 miles of gravel and paved roads, Lake County has more roads to maintain than either of its neighboring counties – Missoula to the south and Flathead to the north – at a fraction of the budget.
To help the county road department keep pace with maintenance needs, on May 13 the county commissioners approved a resolution of intention for an election on a county road maintenance levy. The vote paves the way for a public hearing June 3 followed by a second vote by the commissioners on whether to actually place the levy on November’s ballot.
If approved by voters, the four-mill levy would be collected in two installments of two mills each beginning in November 2022 and is expected to raise about $221,241 annually. Those funds would be used to buy the road oil needed to chip seal surfaces.
Commissioners estimate that the impact on a property owner with a home valued at $200,000 would be about $10.80 per year. Properties in incorporated communities of Polson, Ronan and St. Ignatius would not be subject to the levy.
A previous levy was used to apply a seal coat, a less costly way to maintain road surfaces. The new levy would allow the road department to actually rehabilitate some of the worst paved roads in the county.
“A lot of them are so dilapidated they need to be completely reconstructed,” said County Road Supervisor Jay Garrick.
That entails grinding up the existing surface, adding base gravel, reshaping and compacting the surface, and then paving with chip seal. Total reconstruction costs about $50,000 per mile, with $40,000 of that spent on asphalt.
Fortunately, some gas tax funds can be used to ease the burden on local taxpayers. Commissioners are also hopeful that an infusion of $5.9 million in federal pandemic relief funds might help with road repair. “But we don’t have the sideboards of what we can use that for yet,” said Commissioner Gale Decker.
The proposed levy is an effort to finance “preventive maintenance,” he added. “With the previous levy, we were not actually doing rehabilitation on some of these roads because they’re in such bad shape.”
Lake County maintains 500 miles of paved roads and 700 miles of gravel surfaces on an annual budget of around $2 million. That covers snowplowing, installing and maintaining bridges and culverts and gravel and asphalt production. The road crew has 18 employees, including bridge, crusher and road crews, plus a mechanic shop.
The county mines and crushes its own gravel at sites in St. Ignatius, Ferndale and north of Pablo. “That saves us a lot of money,” said Commissioner Bill Barron.
“Our road crew gets an amazing amount of work done for the number of people and the equipment we have,” adds Decker.
The public hearing on the proposed levy begins at 10 a.m. on June 3 at the Lake County Courthouse in Polson.
