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Livingston Parish OKs Road Resurfacing Plan *** Road Improvements Pass Without a Fight

Posted on: Thursday, 2 March 2006, 21:00 CST

By BOB ANDERSON

Livingston Parish OKs road resurfacing plan *** Road improvements pass without a fight

LIVINGSTON Without a political fight, the Parish Council settled Wednesday on the roads to be resurfaced this year.

Council members agreed on 88.4 miles of roads with the heaviest concentration of improvements going to the eastern side of the parish.

A lot of work also will be done in the Watson area and in the south-central part of the parish.

Council members said they plan to finish their seven-year road list next year a year early by bonding a portion of the sales tax dedicated to the road program. It will take about $50 million to finish the projects planned for this year and next year, Parish President Mike Grimmer has said.

Since a 1-cent sales tax passed in 1997, the parish has resurfaced more than 500 miles of roads.

During the first year of work, the cost was about $100,000 per mile for resurfacing, but that figure rose to $170,000 per mile last year as asphalt costs skyrocketed, said Wayne Martin, the director of the parishs Department of Public Works.

Last year, the 1-cent sales tax brought in nearly $10 million, according to the Livingston Parish School Board, which collects the tax for the Parish Council.

In January, voters approved changes that extended the 1-cent sales tax, made 25 percent of it usable for building a jail and provided for selling bonds for road work based on revenue from the remaining 75 percent of the tax.

Grimmer said he hopes to put this years road work out for bid in April and start construction in June, which is the schedule the parish usually has followed on its smaller road contracts each year.

Wednesday, the council approved this years list of roads prepared by Martin. Martin said that in a few cases, where the roads are in good shape, the entire road wont be cut up and redone. Instead only the portion that is bad will be removed.

We dont want to cut up good roads, but we also dont want to do checkerboards, Martin said.

Though the councils latest road list should be completed next year, there are additional roads in the parish that need resurfacing, Dewey Harrell told fellow councilmen.

Grimmer has taken the position that roads that have been accepted into the parish system in the past few years shouldnt be overlaid until the roads included on the parishs seven-year list are in good shape.

He also has said that in 2008, the parish may need to look at redoing some of the heavily traveled roads that were resurfaced when the program began.

Source: Advocate; Baton Rouge, La.

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