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For the second year in a row, the number of residents paying to control dust on Allen County gravel roads has decreased.
The county raised the price to $1.65 a foot to coat gravel roads this spring. While fewer residents took advantage of the service, some wondered why the county wasn’t converting more gravel roads to paved roads.
Residents paid $69,057 this year to have 41,853 linear feet of road sprayed twice, according to information provided by the county commissioners’ office.
Last year, residents paid $1 a foot for 73,298 feet at a cost of $73,298, said Mike Green, commissioners’ spokesman.
In 2008, 218 residents paid for dust control, compared with 135 this year, he said.
Commissioner Linda Bloom said she received calls from residents this spring complaining about the cost for a service the county previously provided for free.
Bloom isn’t happy the county eliminated free dust spraying, but the county doesn’t have the money to provide the service anymore, she said.
Residents who opted not to pay for dust control this year include homeowners who live off Hanauer Road, on the edge of northwest Fort Wayne near Wallen Road.
Their subdivision actually lies within the Fort Wayne city limits, but the county maintains the gravel road on the western edge of their neighborhood, said Chal Plumley, president of the Lima Valley Community Association.
He’d prefer the county converted the road to pavement.
“It’s just not fit for pets or animals to be out when that road is dusty,” Plumley said.
But the county doesn’t plan to chip and seal the road anytime soon, Green said.
Because of layoffs, the county has reduced the number of gravel roads it converts to paved roads, Highway Director Bill Hartman said.
This construction season, highway workers will finish converting five miles of gravel road. But Hartman doesn’t plan to start any new conversions this fall because of a lack of manpower, he said.
The work could start again next summer depending on his budget, Hartman said.
In the meantime, requests from residents to chip and seal gravel roads continue to stack up, Bloom said.
Both the budget and Hartman’s staff were cut by about 20 percent for 2008 because Fort Wayne’s annexation of much of Aboite Township reduced much of the department’s funding.
Plumley understands that it takes money to improve the road, but he questioned why the county doesn’t use federal stimulus funds to do the work.
Hartman said the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act requires projects that put people to work. The county uses highway staff, not local construction companies, to do this type of work, Hartman said.
Other requirements also exclude chip-and-seal work, he said.
Instead, the county submitted repaving projects along five rural roads to receive federal stimulus funds: Carroll Road from U.S. 33 to Hand Road; Dawkins Road from Doyle Road to Main Street; Ferguson Road from Bluffton to Winchester roads; O’Day Road from Yellow River Road to U.S. 33; and Yellow River Road from Hadley to O’Day roads.
Hartman doesn’t know whether those projects will be financed.
