Clark County Board of Supervisors Looks at Proposed 2015 Budget, Part 4
Thursday, October 9th, 2014 -- 10:12 AM
-The Clark County Board of Supervisors heard the proposed 2015 budget for the county on Thursday of last week.The Clark County Finance Committee had to look at many different factors in preparing the budget for 2015 including road construction in the county.
Since 2006, when levy limits were imposed by the state, the amount of miles of roads Clark County can pave have gone done significantly. The rising cost of road construction has not helped the matter. The cost of paving a road, per mile, back in the year 2000 was $64,821, $171,878 in 2010 and the county is looking at a cost of $238,261 in 2015.
In order to pave a slightly larger amount of roads, the county transferred $600,000 in 2010, $750,000 in 2011 and $160,000 in 2012 to the Highway Fund. In 2014, they had $600,000 worth of debt proceeds transferred to help with the county roads.
Originally, the amount put into the 2015 budget would only have allowed the county to pave 2 miles worth of roads. However, they increased the requested amount by $615,000 in order to do 3 more miles, allowing the county to pave a total of 5 miles of roads for 2015. This puts the county at a 60 year cycle for their roads.
In order to bring in more funds for the roads, the county looked at several options. One was the Wheel Tax Ordinance, which was easily defeated by the board at their Thursday meeting. Now the Finance Committee will look at several other options which include increasing the highway levy, which would mean other department levies would decrease, exceed the levy limits by county referendum, decrease the amount of road construction, which would mean a huge, expensive catch up later on and continue to look for other sources of revenue.
The budget public hearing, amendments and adoption will take place on November 11th.
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.