Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
Hurley — Iron County and local officials took part in a statewide “Turnout for Transportation” meeting Thursday night to discuss the lack of adequate road funding in Wisconsin. Meetings happened simultaneously in every county in the state.
Iron County Highway Commissioner Mike Swartz said a meeting like this had never been done before and indicated how serious the state’s road funding problem is.
After a short video featuring representatives that sponsored the meeting — including the Wisconsin Counties Association, the League of Wisconsin Municipalities and the Wisconsin Towns Association — officials representing Iron County’s towns and cities talked about the issues a lack of finances created for them when trying to maintain their roads.
While the budget Gov. Scott Walker has proposed for the 2017-19 fiscal year increases the amount of funding counties and local municipalities will receive for assistance with road repairs, Swartz told the Daily Globe, the money isn’t enough for much of anything beyond temporary stop-gap measures.
Several attendees echoed a complaint raised in the video — that while the funding is enough to perform some basic repairs, such as chipsealing roads, these were bandages that ignored the problems below the road surface. Multiple town representatives said some of the older roads in their communities still had wood as a road base.
“I think (the video) hit the nail on the head with what’s underneath the roads, and probably everybody in the county has that, where (the roads) are old logging roads with timbers still underneath them that come up in the spring,” Oma Town Chairman Steve Finco said, specifically mentioning Riverside Road as a problem for the town. “That’s so soft, it keeps going down, down, down — the whole road sinks. We can’t haul enough gravel to keep the road above grade.”
The use of antiquated materials, like wood, means the repairs don’t last as long as they would with more modern construction methods — meaning the towns are spending more on repairs while being unable to afford the more complete fixes necessary to keep the roads in good shape.
Several representatives also discussed the increasing difficulty of obtaining gravel to do work on the unpaved roads in their communities.
The problem maintaining some roads has gotten so bad — the price of paving is estimated to have doubled in the last several years — that some towns are converting roads back to gravel.
Fixes like this can sometimes create different problems, with Carey’s Bob Walesewicz saying dust is sometimes an issue for homeowners who have houses built near what used to be paved roads that are now gravel.
“Some of these repairs we’re doing, these Band Aids, actually are creating other issues that we are then having to go back and readdress again because we weren’t able to fix it properly because we’re broke,” Walesewicz said. “We couldn’t grind and reset that asphalt because we can’t afford it.”
With everyone agreeing the roads are in bad shape and need to be fixed, talk turned to the problem with the way the state generates revenue for roads — specifically the gas tax.
With cars becoming increasingly fuel efficient, Walesewicz said there was no indication the annual decrease in demand for gasoline was going to be reversed, meaning revenue from the gas tax would continue to decline.
“The funding mechanism that the states are dealing with, that Wisconsin is dealing with, is really flawed,” Walesewicz said. “The formula, right now, is flawed and (state legislators) are going to have to come up with something.”
A number of solutions to the decline in gas tax revenues were discussed, including increasing the tax, imposing a “wheel tax” on vehicles or imposing a .5 percent sales tax on purchases.
Regardless of the chosen solution, there seemed to be agreement that a decision couldn’t be put off much longer.
“Nobody wants to raise the taxes but everybody wants the services and that’s the way it is,” Gurney’s Tom Innes said.
Even if there is a way to increase revenue, such as raising the gas tax, that might not generate the amount of revenue needed. Walesewicz estimated, based on the amount of gas sold in Iron County, that a 10-cent increase to the gas tax would generate $460,000 in additional revenue. While this sounds like a substantial increase, Swartz told the Daily Globe one mile of road costs roughly $100,000 to repave — meaning a 10-cent increase would only pay for an additional 4.6 miles of paving. Swartz said the county alone is responsible for maintaining roughly 66.7 miles of county trunk roads. While there is a concern about whether rural counties even had the capabilities to generate the necessary revenue themselves, another concern was also raised about whether the money would be evenly distributed throughout the state or be kept in the larger metropolitan areas.
“We don’t want to fight for what we generate, we need more than we generate,” Walesewicz said.
A solution to this fear would be to implement the changed system at a county level, rather than statewide, to ensure each county was at least receiving its own revenue.
The towns aren’t the only ones have troubling keeping up with the necessary work to maintain roads.
Swartz said that if Iron County was to replace the 66.7 miles of county roads every 20 years, its workers would have to do work on roughly 3 miles of road per year. According to Swartz, work is currently being done on roughly 1.2 to 1.7 miles each year.
Other than talking about possible solutions, there is little local municipalities can do without state action to solve the overall problems.
“(Resolutions and contacting legislators are) about the only leverage we have,” Innes said.
The meeting ended with an agreement that Iron County, along with every town and city, would pass a resolution demanding action from Walker and the state government in the hope that enough counties express the desire for action that the state is forced to act.
