Poor infrastructure is closely associated with economic under-performance or decline. The Titus County roads had become a disgrace and drag on the local economy with falling rural property values and added costs for residents and businesses due to wasted time, damaged vehicles and slow emergency response times.
Two years ago the taxpayers of Titus County voted to change the way the County Roads are managed. Day to day responsibility was taken away from the Commissioners. Instead they were required to hire the first ever Titus County Road Engineer and give him responsibility for the roads. The Commissioners retained oversight over the Engineer such as deciding priorities for road repairs and setting the budget for the single Road & Bridge department. Since then the County roads have started to improve with the building of many properly engineered and constructed roads that will last 15 to 20 years. It took many years for the roads to get as bad as they were and it will take many more to restore them.
STEP 1 : RECOGNIZE THE PROBLEM
Like the frog in a saucepan of water that is slowly being brought to the boil, it can be hard to identify when something is not right and decide to do something about it. Back in the 80's and into the 90's the Titus County Roads were considered to be in decent shape.
Going back 75-100 years the original cart tracks were maintained by Commissioners who lived out in their Precincts and the local citizens were expected to help out so many days a year working on their local roads. They all knew the value of being able to get to town to sell their crops and to buy supplies. Over time this changed. At some point all the county dirt roads were upgraded with asphalt which was historically cheap and readily available locally with the Talco oil field and the refinery in Mount Pleasant. This does not mean that they were properly engineered, but more likely just covered with asphalt. To maintain these asphalted roads the seal coating process was used on some roads. This process needs a dozen or more people working together so the Commissioners got together to pool equipment and manpower.
Somewhere in the late 1990”s things started to go badly wrong. The Texas Utilities (later Luminant) power plant and coal mine were running wide open and pumping all kinds of property tax money into the County coffers. While some of it was reinvested into a new jail and the Convention Center, far too much of it was siphoned off by self serving Commissioners and County Judges who voted themselves several large salary increases, plus vehicle allowances and very generous retirement and medical benefits. There was never a plan to upgrade the County Roads while the money was available. The Commissioners stopped cooperating and seal coating ended after a key piece of equipment broke down. Instead they tried to do it on their own in their respective fiefdoms, resorting to higher cost but less effective methods of patching and repairing roads, primarily 'cold mix asphalt' which is easily spread and rolled to make a road surface by a small crew. However 'cold mix' was never intended to be a finishing material as within 5 years it will start to crack, break up and form potholes.
In 2012 Al Riddle was elected Commissioner of Precinct 1. For those of you who don't know, Al is a local guy born in Sugar Hill but made his way up through the trucking industry, first in Dallas and later in New Orleans and New Jersey. This retired trucking industry executive was one of the first people to realize just how bad our roads had become. He knew there had to be a better way than endless pothole filling and little actual road building.
STEP 2 : STOP THE BLEEDING
Al Riddle started asking around at State training events for Commissioners and heard about seal coating and how it was much cheaper and more durable than other methods. He also found out that about 70 of the 254 counties in Texas had adopted what is known as the County Road System or Unit Road System. With voter approval a County can change to a different system where a qualified engineer is hired to look after the roads and the Commissioners positions become more like that of a City Councilman or School board member, setting policy and budgets and providing direction, not managing a small road crew.
In 2016, Al and some of his many friends put together a petition and got more than enough signatures to put the adoption of the County Road System on the November 2016 ballot. This Facebook page was started to help educate people on the dreadful condition of our roads. Many people responded and used it to vent their frustration with how bad the roads actually were and how they had not been resurfaced in 15, 20 or more years. The other Commissioners, via their proxies, tried to defend the old system. The 2016 Proposition was approved with a majority of nearly 500 votes.
After the 2016 Election, like it or not, the Commissioners had to set about hiring a road engineer. After dragging that process out for five months Mr Ledbetter was hired. He had recently retired from TXDOT with well over 30 years of road building experience under his belt. In the first few months he concentrated on getting the road hands from all four precincts used to working together, getting equipment back into working condition (or replacing certain key pieces) and undertaking some basic tasks such as clearing right of ways that had become overgrown due to years of neglect. Later on in 2017 and into early 2018 they started trying to salvage some of the worst roads such as CR 3350 near Argo and then widen and resurface the highly dangerous CR4215 (Roller-coaster Road) and CR 4240 east of town out past the East Loop. About 8 miles of roads were repaired this way. These roads were fixed up using RAP (Recycled Asphalt Paving) which the County can get free from TXDOT, plus cold mix, as all the equipment needed for seal coating was not yet ready. The Engineer is making real good use of the free RAP and has developed a process to grind it up much better than any Commissioner ever could. These roads are now however ready to be seal coated in 2019.
In February 2018 the Commissioners, County Judge and Road Engineer held a workshop to try and identify the first priorities for seal coating. At their February 28th 2018 meeting the list of priorities was unanimously agreed. They totaled 29 miles spread over all or part of 18 roads. The list was in an earlier post from Mount Pleasant For Real that we shared and is also attached to the minutes of the 2-28-18 Commissioners meeting on the County website. After this list was agreed there was a lot of preparation work needed to get these roads ready for seal coating. Without proper prep to dig out and replace soft spots, establish proper cambers, clean out the ditches etc. the seal coating is just wasted.
At the end of June, after about a 20 year hiatus, the first section of County Road was seal coated, CR 1065 just east of Winfield. Following this successful trial the County Engineer and Road Crew started working through the list seal coating sections of CR's 1200, 3210, 4660, 2330. 2470, 3225, 1468 and 3150 for a total of about 15 miles. In addition short sections of 1920 and 1915 west of Sugarhill have been seal coated as a trial. Additionally the Road Crew now looks to seal coat their larger repairs. CR 1315 which runs through a small subdivision just south of the 271 / 271 Business split on the north end of town was seal coated.
In all about 16 miles of roads have been seal coated and about another 8 miles rebuilt ready for seal coating. Not a great dent in the total of nearly 400 miles of County Roads but a good start and way more than in any of the last 20 years.
STEP 3 : BUILD FOR THE FUTURE
Going forward the prep work will continue through the fall, winter and spring ready for the 2019 seal coating season. Seal coating can only be carried out when the minimum night-time temperature is above 50f, so it is pretty much limited to May through September. Some time in early 2019 the Commissioners, Judge and Road Engineer will update the priority list no doubt adding many more roads to it. Your participation in this is encouraged.
In 2019 it is reasonable to expect that a lot more than 16 miles of road will be seal coated. For one the equipment and road hands are all ready to start as soon as it warms up enough so a full five month season for seal coating will be available. The key constraint will be how many roads can be prepped ready for seal coating. The old, unreliable Bomag road re-claimer which plows up and and remixes old road surfaces is a problem. The Commissioners need to replace this for 2019. A new machine will reclaim road 3 to 4 times faster than the antique Bomag. Also the majority of the roads seal coated in 2018 were two lane roads, as more narrower roads are tackled, more miles can be done for the same effort. So with better equipment and maybe a couple more road hands so prep work can continue, even while seal coating is taking place, it is not unrealistic to see our Road Crew getting up to 40-50 miles of road seal coated each year. At that rate all the county roads will be rebuilt and seal coated in around 8-10 years.
4. HOW COULD WE SPEED UP THE ROAD IMPROVEMENTS ?
To speed up the road improvements more money & resources would be needed. With the material for seal coating about $10,000 per mile on narrow low usage roads and $28,000 per mile on two lane higher use roads, the total material cost to seal coat the nearly 400 miles of Titus County roads is around $7 million. To that you need to add material for preparation work estimated at $3 million making total material costs around $10 million. Next you add equipment costs including repairs, diesel and gas and outlays on new equipment, which will likely run around $350,000 annually. The other big cost is obviously the employees. Currently the total payroll and benefits for the sixteen employees in the Road & Bridge department runs about $1,150,000 annually.
So if you stick with getting all the roads rebuilt and seal coated over 10 years the likely cost each year is $1 million of materials, $350,000 for equipment costs and $1.3 million of employee costs with a couple more road hands added. This totals about $2.65 million per year, only $350,000 more per year than was budgeted for roads in 2018. The total cost over ten years would be around $27 million, before inflation.
To go a lot faster would require a substantial increase in the Road Department funding. At around $5 million per year they should be able to get all the roads done in about 5 years providing they can organize and handle building 80 miles per year. The alternative would be to bring in outside contractors and be able to oversee what they do. If you wanted to get everything done in two years it would require approximately $25 to $30 million funded via a bond issue.
We much prefer the slow and steady approach taking 8-10 years to get all the roads rebuilt and seal coated. The key benefit is that most of the $$$ will stay local AND with the guys in the Road Crew putting in the effort and taking pride in this project, will build better roads than any outside contractor ever will.
5. WE CANNOT AFFORD TO GO BACKWARDS
Three out of our four Commissioners have never been in favor of the Unit Road System. They worked against it two years ago and even those who promised to respect the voters wishes did not. All three were actively involved in the petition drive this past summer to get the repeal of the Unit Road System on the November 6th ballot. Additionally Commissioner candidate John Fitch is also against the Unit Road System. They claim they want to 'Take Our Roads Back' but what they really mean is we really need these cushy Commissioner jobs and we need you to protect our excessive salary and benefits.
If you vote 'For' Proposition A you are voting to go back to the old system that had not built a decent road in 20 years.
IN THE TWO YEARS THAT WE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THIS FACEBOOK PAGE, NOT ONCE HAS ANYONE SENT US A PICTURE OF A GOOD ROAD THAT 'THEIR COMMISSIONER' BUILT. Says it all.
They are not planning to carry on seal coating. Fitch keeps talking about having his crew working in his precinct and also about what he had learned helping his Dad when he was a Commissioner. Unfortunately his dad was a Commissioner in the 2000's when seal coating had stopped so all he learned was pot hole filing and maybe putting down ½ a mile of cold mix. His opponent Raymond Johnson has indicated that he will go with what the voters choose.
Jimmy Parker's wife recently posted about “returning the maintenance of the roads back to each Precinct where the employees for each Precinct will work only in their Precinct (except in extenuating circumstances)”. You can only conclude that seal coating is not an extenuating circumstance. A few days later Jimmy Parker contradicted his wife claiming that he was in favor of seal coating. Jimmy Parker saying what he thinks he needs to say to get elected, is hardly a new development. In Precinct 4 you have an excellent alternative, write in candidate Wesley McCollum who is in favor of the Unit Road System.
Going back to the old system would be a disaster. Forget about seal coating and building beautiful roads that will last 15 to 20 years. We will be back to filling potholes and maybe putting down cold mix on a very few miles of road each year. Our opponents claim that the old system was cheaper and cost not much more than $500,000 per year per precinct for a total of $2 million annually. Those old budgets contained about $80,000 per precinct for road materials. That is enough to put down cold mix on only 2 miles of road as it is expensive and costs about $40,000 per mile. Then after 5 years that two miles is just another patch of potholes and you only repaired 10 miles out about 100 in the Precinct in that 5 years. You just can't get there with cold mix and chasing your tail filling in potholes.
SO IN SUMMARY
If you want the Titus County Roads to be steadily rebuilt after 20 years of neglect VOTE AGAINST PROPOSTION A and not for Parker or Fitch.
By rebuilding our roads properly, traveling our County Roads will be safer, quicker and much easier on our vehicles and bodies. Businesses out in the county will be better able to thrive and the rural property market will improve.
If you are happy with overpaid Commissioners doing a crappy job of maintaining roads and wasting our money, vote for prop. A.
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