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County roads. and potholes

H

HughB

Member
This will probably get poofed but here goes. We probably have the worst roads in the U.S here in Alabama. They have been going around putting patches on the patches that patched the original hole. The bridge down the road is in BAD shape. You ask why this is allowed. No Money. We have one of the lowest tax bases in the country. I pay $100 a year in property taxes. I love the low taxes but there has to be some common sense here. They made US 157 four lane. It took them over ten yrs to finish the job. Most of the money came from the federal government. I keep hearing the call for lower federal taxes. If they ever cut them as much as you would like you will all be driving on the same kind of roads we have here. You can't have something for nothing people. Taxes pay for all of the highways in this country. If they cut federal taxes they will simply raise the state taxes to make up for the shortfall. If they don't then you will all be driving on rapidly falling apart highways. Think about how fast the highways in say Michigan fall apart during the winter. Now picture in the spring they tell you the county road dept is out of money till next year. That is what we have here.
Think about if the next time you hit a pothole and knock your front end alignment out of line.
 
You would be surprised at how great a percentage of fuel tax money is/has been diverted for NON-hiway use...and then "our' toll roads are "leased" ( read that as SOLD) to foreign owners. This is NOT just an Alabama problem, but a National problem. Have enjoyed the ride around Birmingham since they got that finished....years ago that part of I-20 was bone rattling in my 18 wheeler. I'm retired now.

Rick
 
No one could have imagined a decade ago the abuse our rural roads in central upstate NY would be taking now. With the diaries consolidated into mega-milk factories, Feed and manure now travel the roads instead of laneways. Most of our town roads, and many of our county roads were never designed/built. They just evolved from paths. That said, we are still a very rich country. And we could have the greatest highway system in the world if we only spent our money wisely. We are just spending it on the wrong things. And very few in power care. It's going to get a lot worse before it ever gets better.
 
Roads here in Michigan are the worst in the Nation. We do have long winters here and the continuious freezing and thawing of the ground takes a heavy toll on the asphalt. Combine that with the salt applied during winter and you have a vicious circle of fixing roads.Our potholes here are gigantic to say the least. Cars always being damaged,especially in the spring.
Our State Tree is the orange construction barrel as of late.Michigan does not have toll roads and the gas tax is the primary revenue used for road repair.
Having traveled South through several states enroute to Flordia as of late,..I can confidentally say your roads down there are much nicer. Hopefully Michigan"s roads will get fixed within the next five - ten years. It will be a slow process since the State is essentially broke.
 
Get Use To It! Our tax base went out with NAFTA. No Jobs, No tax base. Didn't our idiot leaders even give it a thought? Ross Perote couldn't have been any more clearer with his "Big Sucking Sound" example. WATCH OUT FOR THOSE POT HOLES!!!!!!
 
they get plenty of money , they just waste it on certain parts of the country and not your area . have you ever been to Washington d c New York they keep building highways and as gas goes up less money comes in people can't afford the gas, another buck and this country will be in a greater depression . this country has already sent all the jobs that make anything to china and buying it back with McDonald's jobs . go figure what's happening
 
Do you know that half of the federal taxes collected gp for mass transit systems instead of the roads. The problem is every where thanks to our great congress thats why the vote yesterday should wake some prople up get involved.
 
at least you have asphalt.almost every road in my county is gravel(mostly mud).If you dont have a 4x4 you get stuck every time it rains.And in the winter if you dont plow yourself a path you dont go anywere.
 
Yes, our fuel tax pays for the buses that haul project-dwellers across town to buy dope... That sums it up in a nutshell..
 
In MN most of the road funds come from on-road fuel tax, I believe. Our present nnalert Gov, refused to raise any taxes. and let our bridges deteriorate until one fell down, killing about 10 people. The inspectors had told the DOT that it was structurally deficient and the DOT didn't know what to do so they were putting a cosmetic patch on the roadway when it fell down. I heard the DOT let it fall down so they could get more federal money to replace it!
 
I can't blame the present administration. The problem here has been going on for years. Yes, a lot of tax money has been wasted but it has been the same old story no matter who is in office.
 
Our road taxes here in Colorado goes for transit too. They spend millions on buses and trains and it still costs more to ride the bus or train then to drive your car. Communism never works.
 
A couple years ago we actually had a vote on this in Missouri. "Should tax money set aside for roads be used on roads". The people couldn't wait to vote. It passed overwhelmingly!
 
As said before.. You haven't saw NOTHING till you come to Michigan. My gravel road gets scraped about 3 times a year.. (usually the day before it rains) They plow snow 5-6 days after we get the snow. Spring thaw HEH.. hope your 4x4 works.. and dig out the super swampers.. you'll need them.. Ruts 8 to 12 inches deep.. and you deal with that for 8 weeks before they do anything about that.

Our paved roads are not much better. 2 miles from here there was a "sink hole" about 4 feet in diameter, and looked to be quite deep.. The fix was a orange barrel in the hole (and about a foot of it stuck out from the hole) and they painted a arrow on the road and wrote HOLE in big letters. The final fix: 2 weeks later they filled it with cold patch.. and now it's starting to "sink" again I noticed the other day.

It has now been said that instead of fixing the paved roads in this county, they are going to roto mill the bad ones and spread gravel on them and call em fixed (so they can scrape those ones 3 times a year too)

Done ranting now..

Brad
 
In this area about 60% of transportation funds go to public transit, which carries about 3% of the passenger miles.
 
IMHO, folks like the Tea Party crowd have put us in a jam. nnalert will no longer raise road taxes, even if the current system is losing money, and nnalert CAN'T raise road taxes and hope to keep their jobs. So what we're seeing is a RESULT of that mindset.

In MY county, we have a riverboat casino, and a large percentage of casino tax money has gone into local roads. But that's a two-edged sword. In most cases, the county just paved over gravel roads that should've been re-engineered, and the pavement there has the life expectancy of a potato chip. And if the casino has a bad year, there'll be less money for roads and everything else we've become used to; and when Louisville gets gambling[I'm sure it's a case of "when" and not "if"], that boat'll be gone so fast it'll make your head swim. THEN there'll be NO money for roads locally, just like everywhere else in the country.
 
Does not matter who is in offices as long as they are all crooks. Face it now days the gov. is run by the rich and for the rich so country roads etc do not matter unless one of the rich guys so happen to live down that road and that road will be the only good one for miles.
 
I say if the gooberment would cut off welfare checks, give the leaches a shovel, put them to cleaning out ditches, and pay them by the mile the roads would last alot longer.
 
If all the folks who laughed at Ross for say'n that, who are now out of work had voted for him this country would be much better off today.
 
Bob, You have to add to that the drilling rigs that have started running the roads in the last 5 or 10 years. Maybe money in the wells for the lease holders and the gas companies, but the road base damage is left for the towns to eat.
 
The states disburse the fed road money how they see fit. Your state appears to be more crooked than KY. Where ever I've traveled, once the stimulus was put out, everybody is repairing roads.
You pay plenty of road tax at the pump every year. That crook that over sees tax income from oil companies gave the oil companies back ten billion dollars.
Of course let's blame everything on the poor people, instead of the crooked politician or all the state workers standing around at $30+ an hour.
 
I live in Tuscola County, Mi. We ave a 1/2 mil tax for road repair in my township and another county wide. The roads are being improved. My road was graveled several yrs ago and kept geaded. Paved roads are being improved and repaved. I see real improvement here. Kalkaska county has some terrible roads. Maybe in Alabama your towns ships need to step up and take control.

One problem in Mi is we have the highest weight limits in the nation. Realy beats up the State and Federal highways.
 
Yes Denver is a huge collector of our road tax money for their mass transit dream.Wonderful people in our congres.
 
I live in Livingston county, Michigan. The problem here is there is no money for maintenance. And the voters here have never voted for a road millage. About 1/3 of our residents are retired, and many go south for the winter. And they will never vote for any tax.
 
(township dirt road rant)
Im gonna post this without first reading everyone elses horror stories..In '06' my township apparently filed for fema funds (believe thats everyones money)....storm torn roads or some such qualifier. We have no ditches...the commissioner, who controls the bridges and ditches in the townships says the roads have sunk. So the township trustee , an elected official who controls the road surfaces, and can (and does) tell the commish to bite a big one, decides to spend the $$$ on river rock, tons and tons of river rock. Hard shearing to sharp edges when they do break. I figure I'm gonna loose about 200$/vehicle to excessive wear and tear. Bring in the flat tires and lets do an election recall. A nnalert kinda guy..his road is beautiful..nice abs crushed lime rock..crowned..SMOOTH as a.

I don't go more than 10 mph, let people go around me. They aren't too bad right now...windrowed in big piles to either side, just waiting for the trustee to bring all that hard, tire tearing rock across the smooth tracks its taken months to achieve.
 
Hughb,
I agree with the other posters that it is not HOW MUCH tax money we pay, it is HOW IT IS USED.

Government is supposed to do for its citizens what they can't do for themselves, like guard the borders (not doing a real good job down South, eh?) and build/maintain roads, etc. The intent should NOT BE to take YOUR money and give it to someone else.

With the new Socialism that external_link is bringing to town, we are giving FREE cell phones to those on government aid, GIVING ownership of GM & Chrysler to the UAW, subsidizing everything in sight. And paying for all this by borrowing money from overseas. Look at all the billions of dollars that is given to foreign countries whose citizens HATE AMERICA.

To be fair, external_link didn't start this. It started years ago when politicians found out they could buy votes and maintain their stay in office by dumping bushel baskets of money out the window. However, the lean to the left, where illegal entry into the US is not a crime, where every citizen is cared for cradle to grave by the government, where the trend is to "press for 2 for Spanish" instead of "if you can't understand this message, learn English", is killing this country.

We need leadership that will tell ALL the special interests (Wall St, Tree Hugger Environmentalists, advocates for welfare, Unions, etc) that it doesn't matter what your politics are, government is out of the "handout" business.

IMO, if a local road needs fixing, it should come from local taxes. If a State road needs fixing, it should come from State dollars. If an Interstate highway needs fixing, it should come from Federal dollars.

Nowadays, States and local communities talk about getting Federal grants and money for every fricking thing and shout that it's FREE money. Guess what, it's NOT FREE MONEY. It's OUR money to begin with and I don't care what government entity collects it, the politicians should ALL still be frugal and spend it wisely and not on ANY Social Welfare program.

Sorry for the rant, but it seems every day on the radio, I hear some new thing that makes my blood boil because it is contrary to the principles that this Country was founded upon.
 
Slight correction but that was to re-direct the fuel tax to the Department of Transportion rather than the general fund. Notice that the road repairs and improvements went into high gear since. A lot of the fuel tax was going somewhere else.
 
Well now you see what your future Health Care will be like.More $$$$ isn't the answer if it was then we'd be #1 in World in education instead of being down in 3rd world territory and Poverty would have been eliminated years ago instead of getting worse.The problem is Gov't is going to screw it up, too many fingers in the pie and Gov't Bureaucrats that only know how to take coffee breaks and don't have a clue if they did actually care about getting something done.
 
I am a township road commissioner in Illinois and have to deal with this daily. Some points to ponder:
1-My state is BROKE! They have been cutting our motor fuel tax money to the county which gives it to the townships.
2-The board of trustees will not raise taxes, lots of retirees around.
3-We have to deal with all the prevailing wage BS and the contractors we deal with have to pay this and into some kind of apprentice program that the union specifies or they'le protest every bid. Guess who gets to pay for all that?
4-Trucking rates are up costs more to even get gravel.We used to oil 5 miles of road a year now we can barely do 1. This year 0, all the money goes for rock. Don't even ask where the price of oil has gone!
We are one of the smallest counties in Il, but are tax rates are as high as the next county over, highly populated.
Sorry for the long rant, it's frustrating to see what you have to do but can't get it done because all the BS!
 
> Maybe in Alabama your towns ships need to step up and take control.

I don't pretend to know the inner workings of politics, but in my township, the roads are always much nicer than the county road they're connected to. On my property taxes, there's a line item for the amount of tax the township is leveling. If townships don't have this power where you live, maybe they should. If they're resorting to begging money off the country, you know it's not going to work out very well when the county is broke.

If I wasn't so annoyed, I would find it pretty funny when the I have to push snow with my bumper at noon on the county highway, while all the township roads were plowed before the sun came up. I feel sorry for the township's contractor, because he has to come back in the afternoon to clean up the intersections.
 
Here's an anonymous quote I picked up some time ago which pretty much hits the nail on the head...

"The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

Christopher

PS- Our taxes are low here in the Ozarks, too. And the roads look like it. I've come to accept it as part of the equation and don't complain about it. At the same time, our county has no zoning, no building permits, etc., etc. So we have quite a few freedoms here which have gone by the boards in most other parts of the country.
 
In Michigan, the road tax has been declining because people are driving less = less money for roads.
 
Lot of truth to this.... Years ago, there was ONE school bus that went down the road twice a day. Now, my neighbors and I are served by 3 different school districts! Not to mention a bus comes and picks up and/or drops off the pre-school kids.

Instead of a farmer taking 1-2 wagon loads of corn to town, now there is a semi hauling it away. It's progress. The small township roads just haven't kept up with it. Plain and simple.
 
Instead of asking people to give up more and more of their hard earned money, shouldnt we be asking those who collect the money we give up just where its all going? Everyone complains about the roads, the schools, the playgrounds, this that and the other but yet all are paying taxes. Where does it go? Most likely to line some pockets of bureaucrats.
 
Tea Party has BOTH the nnalert AND the nnalert running scared...so they ARE in control, even if they're NOT in office.
 
Back in 1985, the Heritage Foundation ran an article about why federal "revenue sharing"--started by that leftist nnalert socialist Richard M. Nixon in 1972--should be done away with. Now, 25 year later, the words STILL ring true.

I'm sure that between 1985 and today there have been a few nnalert-majority Congresses who could've done away with revenue-sharing, if they had WANTED to be the conservatives that they claim to be. Instead, they turned to be CINO's--Conservatives In Name Only. We KNEW the nnalert wouldn't be conservative, but we HOPED the nnalert would be...and time and again, we've been shocked and disappointed. You'd think we'd learn, but I guess voters only identify with the party NAME these days, and not what the CANDIDATES stand for.
Revenue Sharing
 
If you have no idea where your county funds are going, I suggest you attend a meeting of the Commissioners--who make "policy" decisions--or the County Council--who make the financial decisions. Those are the groups that control where your funds go, and how much goes where. AND then pester your state legislature, and especially your local reps, about putting legislation in place to REQUIRE annual audits of the county books, to make SURE that NO ONE is illegally "lining some pockets" with your tax dollars. IOW, get involved!
 
Our paved roads are not much better. 2 miles from here there was a "sink hole" about 4 feet in diameter, and looked to be quite deep.. The fix was a orange barrel in the hole (and about a foot of it stuck out from the hole) and they painted a arrow on the road and wrote HOLE in big letters. The final fix: 2 weeks later they filled it with cold patch.. and now it's starting to "sink" again I noticed the other day.

Brad
Click to expand...

Probably a cross tube took a dump. They had us out dumping hot patch into an old cross tube that collapsed in the middle of a road.

There are some bright people running the road commissions. :roll:


BTW I am in Mich, I vote for lower taxes because they are being wasted. You put your books out their for the public to review, maybe you will get more votes the next ballot. A few cities are doing this in online format.
 
Michigan's roads have to be some of the worst. We have log trucks running 24/7 that weight 164,000lbs then some, hundreds of freeze and thaw cycles a year, not to mention the snow that gets scraped off and then salted to death.
 
Running scared? Well, that's a good enough start for me. Someone needs to do it, and its far better late than never.

Mark
 
Michigan has the higest weight limits in the country. Also overweight fines do not go to roads, they go to libraries.

Did you know that the MDNRE gets 1/3 of the gas tax? The tax on gas is $0.19 per gallon. MDNRE gets 6 cents, MDOT gets 6 cents, County Road Commissions get 6 cents, the bridge fund ges 1 cent.

Federal Aid projects pay prevailing wage. Road Commissions used to be able to do $300,000 worth the reconstruction work with their own forces. Now it's limited to $100,000 due to contractors lobying.

Federal money can only be used on certain roads. Here, if townships raise their own millages, the money can be used for road reconstruction and repair. No federal or state strings attached. If the millage is worded correctly it can be used for snow plowing as well.

Let me just say there are a lot of special group out there that want road funds to be used for something else. Road commission have to spend 1% of their revinues for NON MOTORIZED USE!
 
I live in Lapeer county, I work for MDOT and do not make $30 an hour. I have been there 10 years. The big issue is consultants that are draining the state dry. I get paid about $20 an hour, since we are so under staffed we hire scabs to over see projects, they charge the state $100 an hour plus. Here is a good one, ever hear of a DBF project? its called a design build finance. contractor bids a job, if low bid it is awarded, then the cont designs, builds, and the state finances it. Bad news for us, contractor scabs out all inspection, so if the inspector is paid by the contractor who is he going to favor. Oh and the state transportation fund has been cut by 75% for 2011, bad roads, get used to them
 
Roads
Seems to be a problem all over, but here it is not a bad as some places.
Pine Co Mn, Chengwatonna Twp. County Commissioner for my district is also my barber, so I don't grumble too much while he is roaming around my ears with a sharp scissor, but i do gently let my feelings be known. Occasionally have to call the Head Honcho at county shop if something gets really bad.
Township Board is pretty relaxed. Most monthly meetings have 2 or 3 citizens in audience, usually to present app for building permit or something like that, maybe a dozen at the annual meetings.
Township road budget this year is $50,000. That is for gravel, grading, snow plowing & general repair. Maintenance dept is 1 man, grader, dump truck/plow, loader & brush cutter. Gravel stockpile is getting low, so extra money set aside this year to crush another 20,000 yards, should last several years. New gravel is added to x no of miles every year, with more as needed in trouble spots. Grading, snow plowing, & weed mowing on as-needed basis. One of the board supervisors is a school teacher, so if a section of road gets in bad shape, the bus drivers get on his case. All equipment is paid for, but plan to replace grader next year.
Next township to the north has no equipment of its own, hires all grading, plowing done, sets budget at $300 a month. If anything extra needs to be done, have to call special voter's meeting for more money. Their roads are in very poor condition.
Just the way it is here, could be a bit better, but could be a lot worse too.
Willie
 
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