Infrastructure Committee: On Roads & Road Work
After holding no meetings in June or July, the Roads & Infrastructure Committee spent most of its August 11 meeting listening to a lot of seemingly disjointed details about Roads Department work from the County Road Foreman.
Presiding online, Chair JP Justin Knight (R, Dist. 1) introduced a “mid-year review” by Mark Ledbetter, which consisted of a list of road names grouped together as 2020 Asphalt Projects to Date, Future 2020 Asphalt Projects, Completed 2020 Chip And Seal Projects, Future 2020 Chip And Seal Projects, and Bridges 2020.
The printout showing Road & Bridge – Culverts gave completion dates throughout 2020 in addition to road names, but otherwise no written costing, budget, or planning data was shared with the Committee. One JP remarked afterward, “It’s more than we’ve received in the past.”
Ledbetter made several points about Faulkner County road work:
♦ “If your driveway pipe goes bad and it’s in the right of way, you pay for the pipe, we put it in and furnish the gravel. And we do a bunch of those, but that’s not included in this [report].”
♦ On state aid roads, “the County and state split” some costs; the state does “all the engineering, all the bidding out; they do all the legwork, and inspecting.”
♦ Roads are eligible for state aid if they “are a connector” road between state highways; “it does have to be from one state highway to the other.”
♦ “All the roads we’re doing on state aid, we’ll try to add a foot to each side of the road. It doesn’t seem like much but a foot gives you — after they stripe it with a white line, it seems like a whole lot more than it is because you have some shoulder before you actually get to the shoulder.”
♦ West Cadron Ridge Road from Hwy. 65 to Hwy. 25, a state aid road project, cost Faulkner County $430,000 (half the $860,000 cost).
♦ On “state jobs, towards the end of this month [Rogers Group is] going to … put a crew on us and we’ve got all these prepared to pay so we’re hoping to get them all done for the first year.”
♦ Faulkner County is “partnering with the City (Conway) doing the base work and everything; we’re going to provide the asphalt for those … streets” in Cimarron Park north of I-40.
♦ Faulkner County owns a chip seal machine, so “we do our own chip seal,” while Rogers Group “lays all the asphalt” other than “a few small jobs.”
♦ Faulkner County has “60 bridges the AR DOT (Arkansas Department of Transportation) inspects each year … anything over 20 feet.”
♦ “We have issues with” every bridge on the printout, including “washing out” and “backing up.”
♦ “We’ve got the designs for a bridge” on Stanley Road and “old Springfield Road” (but those items were not included on the printout). “We put in for two state mitigation grants … for $150,000 each [and] should be finding out pretty soon,” however, Ledbetter provided no other details.
♦ “We’ve probably got 300 bridges 20-foot or less across the County that we built over the past years. … We’ve got some more smaller box bridges that we’re going to try to do” this year. “We just pick the one that we feel is the most trafficked, the highest need….”
♦ “Bridges have cost us anywhere from $400,000 to $700,000 a piece,” but Ledbetter provided no other details to help understand that figure.
Ledbetter was unable to answer other questions and concerns:
♦ How many miles total have we done with these road projects?
♦ How many miles for the future (remainder of 2020) are we looking at?
♦ “I don’t know if we will or will not get up to all these asphalt projects; it’s dependent upon weather.”
♦ A list of future state aid projects for 2021 “is still being compiled, but we hope to do about the same amount of mileage next year as we did this year.”
♦ What’s the timeline on future bridge projects?
JP Jerry Boyer (R, Dist. 12) asked for an update on the Treasure Hills subdivision, and JP Kris Kendrick (R, Dist. 9) asked for a report “maybe for next month” on total mileage completed for aspalt and chip and seal projects.
Knight remarked that he would ask Judge Jim Baker to provide the Committee a walkthrough of levee repairs made since the May 2019 Arkansas River flooding, “maybe not in September, maybe in October,” and the meeting was adjourned.
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In June, JP Randy Higgins (R, Dist. 2), Chair of the Courts & Public Safety Committee, had suggested the Quorum Court add a Building & Grounds Committee. His Committee agreed to “ask the Chair of the Courts & Public Safety Committee to have a conversation with” the Infrastructure Committee “to see where it goes.”
Videos edited from original video on Faulkner County’s YouTube channel.)
Visit Faulkner County Reports on YouTube for more videos and video excerpts from this and other County meetings.
