County Road Prioritization List Approved

Stephens County Commissioners set their road priorities for SPLOST VI.

The county commission on Tuesday approved a road prioritization list for SPLOST VI monies that are being collected to spend on roads.

The list approved Tuesday represents the roads that will be worked on using the $9.3 million in SPLOST VI and state money set aside for roads that Stephens County expects to receive over the next six years.

County Administrator Phyllis Ayers said the road list is the result of years of work.

Ayers said that it started with the county’s Roads and Bridges Committee working with the Public Works Department to assess the county’s roads.

“Public Works Director Tim Mitchem did a rating sheet of every single road in this county,” said Ayers. “We reviewed that data and made some changes to that data.”

According to Ayers, those changes took place over a number of meetings.

The result was grouping the county’s roads into four categories. Those are excellent to good roads, good to fair roads, poor roads, and very poor or failing roads.

Ayers said the roads and bridges committee then looked at how to split the money between those different categories of roads.

She said most of the money will be spent on roads in fair condition or better, which is how the majority of the county’s roads are recognized.

According to Ayers, about 18 percent will be spent on excellent to good roads, 61 percent on the good to fair, 14 percent on the poor, and 7 percent on the very poor and failing, which she called the most expensive to fix.

Ayers said by keeping up maintenance on roads in better shape, the county can save money in the long run by keeping those roads from falling into poor or failing condition, which would then cost the county more to fix years down the road.

She said the final step was figuring out which roads in which category would take priority.

“We looked at things such as how many homes were on the road, how much the road was traveled, is it an arterial road,” said Ayers.

A proposal was then brought before the county commission, which provided input.

Changes were then made, leading to the list adopted by the county Tuesday.

As for the money, Ayers said staff continues to work on the process of forward funding the work initially through $4.5 million in general obligation bonds that would then be paid back with SPLOST VI proceeds.

The commission gave approval last month for staff to begin that work.

County commissioners will still have to give final approval for any bonds to be issued.

Ayers said at this time, the county does not have a firm proposal on how much the bond issue would cost the county or exactly what the interest rate would be, though she notes the county does have an excellent bond rating.