By Traci Chapman
Published on September 27, 2008

Escalating costs are leading government officials to work together to seek ways to pay for needed road and bridge repairs.

Canadian County Commissioner Phil Carson spoke about one such program at the commissioners’ regular meeting Monday. Carson said he was one of “several” attendees at a meeting sponsored by the Association of County Commissioners of Oklahoma last week in Chickasha.

“Road and bridge funding is getting so expensive that we’re grabbing at straws to finance projects,” Carson said. “We want to work together on our five-year road and bridge plan.”

In addition to county commissioners, Carson said representatives from private industry and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes participated in the meeting.

“It only makes sense for us to work in partnership with all of these different entities, and with rising fuel costs and other expenses, it may come to the point that we have no other way to do it,” he said.

Angela Blind, road construction program director with the C&A Tribes, said her office will work with commissioners throughout the nine counties adjacent to tribal offices.

“We’re really in the inventory phase right now — we’re prioritizing our projects,” she said. “We’re trying to increase our road repair allocations, and we want to build better relationships with the county commissioners in this process.”

District 2 Commissioner Don Young said state funding for bridges has been cut, causing problems for officials trying to “keep roads safe.”

“We can complete bridge projects that have already been started, but anything new has been put on hold — there just isn’t any funding to do it,” he said.

The escalating cost of asphalt and other materials has been a major factor in government agencies’ ability to complete projects, both locally and at the state and federal level, said Jay Adams, assistant planning division manager at Oklahoma Department of Transportation.

“The increase in costs has absolutely destroyed our eight-year construction work plan,” Adams said. “When the costs just completely blow your project estimates out of the water, you can’t really have a feasible plan.”

Those costs include an increase in asphalt prices from $282 per ton in September 2007 to $662 a ton now, Adams said.

“There’s no way to get around that kind of increase,” he said.

Higher fuel prices have compounded the situation, Carson said, impacting not just asphalt prices but costs for other materials.

“It also hurts our ability to get the job done in straight costs of doing business,” he said. “The increases in operations are skyrocketing because it costs so much to run our equipment, in addition to the higher prices of the supplies we need to complete repairs.”

Carson said he hopes agencies “banding together” to find solutions helps the situation.

“We’ve got a bad situation here, and we need to work together to keep these roads safe for our citizens,” he said. “Hopefully, we can work together and learn from each other to accomplish that.”