LIMA — With the Allen County Engineer’s Office facing dwindling revenue from gas taxes and license fees, workers remain in “preservation mode,” according to county engineer Brion Rhodes.
“We don’t have money to do the maintenance we have to do, so we’re trying to do absolutely everything we can with the bare minimum money we have,” he said. “Comparing it to a car, we’re just trying to do oil changes right now, and we’re hoping that next year, we’ll have the money for some new tires. So we’re doing lots of chip and seal work, we’re doing patching and sealing, anything we can do since we don’t have the money to lay asphalt to pave.”
While the office has to do more with less, work is still needed on the county’s road infrastructure, prompting the engineer to appear before county commissioners Thursday to approve two new contracts.
“It’s been a wet spring, but we’re prepping for our construction season,” he said. “To do that, we have two bids that we opened up recently. The first is for our liquid asphalt, which we use for our tar and chip work, and we awarded that to K-Tech. It’s about $600,000 worth of asphalt. The second bid is for our striping program, and that’s about $50,000 worth of paint, about 6,000 gallons of yellow paint and about 700 gallons of white paint, and that will do approximately 300 miles of county, township and municipality work.”
The paint will be provided by Texas-based Ennis Paint, Inc. Indiana-based K-Tech has worked with the county with asphalt for the past three years, with county engineers satisfied with the product.
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