Chambers County Commission holds Five-Year Transportation Plan Development work session

BY KADIE TAYLOR

THE LAFAYETTE SUN

CHAMBERS COUNTY — The Chambers County Commission met on Nov. 3 to discuss the success of the previous 10-Year Transportation Plan and begin discussing the upcoming Five-Year Transportation Plan.

“My goal today is to kind of give you all an update on where we stand with the 10-year plan,” said Chambers County Engineer Josh Harvill. “[I want to] make sure y’all have a good feel for what we had set out to do and what we accomplished with that. Then, hopefully [we can] set the stage for moving into this next five-, six-year plan that we have on the horizon, and start getting y’all thinking toward what may be your vision or goals that you want to set as a part of that.”

According to statistics presented by Harvill, from the 10-year plan — from 2016 to 2025 — 155.18 road improvements and nine bridge improvements were completed.

“Our mission statement as a part of our 10-year plan was that we wanted to improve safety, we wanted to target economic development and stronger communities and neighborhoods,” he said.

“What we identified was a lot of smaller subdivisions that were county-maintained, that may have 50 to 60 houses in them, and the road has never been resurfaced since it was originally paved when the subdivision was first developed. So we tried to target a lot of that at the very first part of our 10-year plan.”

Harvill said one of the reasons for a shift from a 10-year plan to a five-year plan is the change that can occur across a decade.

“When we adopted our plan, this was what our sheet of music, so to speak — that the Highway Department  was to work from,” he said. “This is where we went — we dove into this vision that y’all set and we started identifying projects off that… What we actually did in 10 years, you see some really, really big numbers, and a lot of that is because of how hard we worked and how hard [the Commission] worked, trying to find every penny you could find to put into our roads and bridges. A lot of it has to do with some decisions [the Commission] made.”

Through investments of funding into important tools and the Rebuild Alabama Act, Harvill said the Highway Department was able to exceed the goals set in the 10-year plan.

“With some equipment that we purchased and changes in the way we were doing some of our road improvements from the Highway Department’s perspective — then obviously, the biggest impact was Rebuild Alabama,” he said. “When we first got the Rebuild gas tax, it was right around half a million, and now it’s bringing in over a million. What it also did was set up a swap of federal funds.”

Harvill said Chambers County can be competitive for national grants that focus on rural road safety, and he plans to continue to update road safety in Chambers County. Also, during the previous 10-year safety plan, Harvill said a Local Road Safety Plan was adopted.

“Through that Local Road Safety Plan came the tree trimming that we’re doing, the paved shoulders that we’ve done, some of the super elevation corrections that we’ve done and all the striping that we’ve started doing that we used to not do,” he said. “All of that came out of that Local Road Safety Plan, which all started with your vision at the beginning of this 10-year plan.

“We accomplished a lot from a road and bridge improvement standpoint, but some decisions were made as part of this transportation plan due to that vision that you guys set for us.”

Through adding more road preservation efforts to the upcoming Five-Year Transportation Plan, Harvill said he expects to increase the longevity and usability of roads prolonging its use before extensive repairs are necessary.

“If we do road work and we do a road improvement to a road — whether it’s preservation, resurfacing or reconstruction — the idea is, take whatever level of service it is — if you’re doing reconstruction or resurfacing, you’re greatly improving that level of service,” he said. “If you’re doing pavement preservation, the idea is to keep it as good or a little bit better, and push it down the road before it gets bad — much further than it would [have lasted]. Pavement preservation usually adds on about five to 10 years of additional life [for a road]. So a good way to think about that is, if a road is okay right now, if I did nothing in 10 years — it may be bad, but if I do this pavement preservation technique in 10 years — it’s still okay. May not be great, it didn’t get resurfaced, but you’re spending a lot less money on it, and you’re delaying that inevitable higher expenditure.”

As the Five-Year Transportation Plan continues to be developed, Harvill said he is working to clearly communicate with the community through public hearings.

“As we get ready for public hearings — the next work session, what I wanted to do was to look at our revenues, and what I’ve done preparing for that is I’ll look at 2015 all the way through 2025, and then look at 2026 look at how our revenues have changed,” he said. “And we’ll come up with a conservative estimate of what we want to base our plan around. Then we’ll talk about potential projects and how y’all want to prioritize this time.”