Hardin County has 777 miles of gravel roads which need constant attention at a time when the price of just about everything has been going up.
Hardin County Engineer Taylor Roll tells Radio on the Go News that his county receives up to 7-million dollars a year in revenue to help with his department, especially on maintaining a good system of gravel roads.
“Wheel path is near the center of the road and it kind of takes away the crown. Go for four percent and that’s defined as like the slope from the top of the road to the edge of the road that the water runs off. And as your road gets flatter your water can’t move away and then the same thing happens on the outside. The tires push the road down and then your shoulders come up. So something we do in the shoulder and the spring is we’ll go by and the motor grader will kind of cut the shoulder and bring it onto the road and then he’ll kind of try to let it dry out and then he’ll bring it back to the middle to kind of rebuild your crown and then we try to cover it up with rock.”
Roll says despite the millions of dollars in revenue, there is not enough funding to do work on everything that needs it.
“Our biggest money problem always seems to be bridges. We need to replace about three a year, according to our math, but we only have enough money to do one per year. When you run all those numbers out, you have to make some hard decisions. You know, you got some bridges that only get five vehicles a day, and when it’s their time, maybe those don’t get replaced. Every situation on every bridge is different, and we’d love to replace them all. But realistically, I don’t know if we can keep that going as much as we’d like.”
Hardin County has just under 300 miles of paved roads. The secondary roads department is authorized for 37 employees, with 33 of those jobs filled at the present time.
