Finance Chair, Georgia State Senate Legislative Session

Maintaining 234 Miles

Public Works

November 2, 2024

Few city government units have as diverse responsibilities as the Street Department.

Rome Public Works Director Chris Jenkins jokingly refers to the unit as the streets, drainage, and recreation department. In recent years, the street department has taken on the responsibility for maintaining Rome’s growing trail network and the Town Green in front of the Forum River center.

What the Rome Street Department doesn’t do is maintain
state routes that traverse the city, whether it’s Dean Avenue (GA 101), Turner McCall Boulevard, and Martha Berry Boulevard (GA 1) to Shorter Avenue and the Alabama Highway (GA 20). The state is responsible for maintaining those roads. City crews frequently mow grass and pick up litter along some of the state routes because the state has so many miles of roads to cover. Inmate crews are often used to assist with litter pick up.

That still leaves some 234 miles of streets that city crews maintain daily. In addition to the streets themselves, the crews are responsible for mowing and weed-eating the rights of way that border the city streets and maintaining drainage basins to keep them free and clear of debris. Most of the time, streets experience flash flooding due to clogged drainage, which can result when garbage or yard debris is piled up in the streets, and a severe thunderstorm occurs.

The street department is also charged with repairing and maintaining sidewalks throughout the city. To the average citizen, the condition of roads is their chief concern.

The city and Floyd County have an agreement for road resurfacing work. The city uses its machinery to mill roads while the county is responsible for repaving. That resulted from negotiations after legislation was passed several years ago to help make sure that city residents are getting a fair share of county services for the county taxes they pay in addition to their city taxes.

Jenkins has typically budgeted between $175,000 and $200,000 a year for resurfacing, but that only covers about two miles of work. Current asphalt prices are close to $100,000 a mile. If a private contractor, not the county, were used, the asphalt cost would be closer to $150,000 a mile.

Fortunately, the city received Local Maintenance Improvement Grant funds from the state to extend the resurfacing program which is generally between $500,000 and $550,000 a year. In 2024, the LMIG money totaled $523,000.

Rome received a bonus allocation of $647,000 from the state Local Road Assistance Program in the summer of 2024 and will have up to three years to spend those funds on road projects. Jenkins assures Romans that the timing factor will not be an issue. It will get another close to six miles of road resurfaced.

The city uses a rating formula to prioritize which streets are to be paved. That formula considers not only the condition of the roads but also the amount of traffic that travels on those roads. If a poorly graded road gets 10-20 cars a day, it’s not as likely to move up the list as fast as a similarly graded road with 200 cars a day.

Weather conditions can also affect the determination of annual priorities, primarily in the winter. This fall, a road with a C grade could become an F with a particularly hard winter.

While crops and lawns love rain, water is not always a friend of roads. Surface water that occasionally bubbles up can cause subsurface conditions to fail, leading to potholes. Cracks in the pavement or concrete can get filled with water that freezes during the winter, causing the pavement to deteriorate.

Speaking of winter, Rome has four trucks that it uses to spread brine when freezing rain or snow is predicted. Major bridges, even on state routes, along with areas around the two hospitals and nursing homes, get special attention first, then neighborhood streets. The brine mixture is used both before and after winter precipitation since the city has limited equipment to clear snow from the roads.

Something for Romans to keep an eye on is a new Freight Plan, which the Georgia Department of Transportation has mandated. The plan recommends eliminating as many at-grade railroad crossings as possible, limiting trucks in downtown Rome, the expansion of freight routing through Richard B. Russell Airport, and addressing freight limiting bridges. Rome-Floyd Planning Director Brice Wood points out that if a lot of freight trucks go to electric models, the increased weight factor will have a huge impact on the condition of local bridges.