The statewide budget available to fix the resulting road damage is falling short, placing a strain on the repair time, according to Michigan Department of Transportation officials.
State Transportation Director Kirk T. Steudle said in a statement that the uptick in road damages caused by weather has slowed repair rates statewide.
The department’s maintenance budget for this winter is $88 million. Steudle said the department is expecting to exceed that budget by about $40 million this year.
Although the department can only address East Lansing’s business routes, department communications director Jeff Cranson said the Senate’s recent approval of legislation giving $100 million geared toward road maintenance could help fill the deficit, if approved by Snyder.
“The supplemental, which still needs sign-off from the House and the governor, would stave off the need to take from summer maintenance funds-mowing, litter pickup ... to fill the winter hole,” he said.
City Manager George Lahanas said the condition of state roads is poorer now than they were 10 years ago, and the downturn of the economy has posed a struggle with investing in infrastructure.
Aside from the economy, which East Lansing’s five-year financial forecast shows is slowly improving, the city doesn’t seem to be losing funding for roads.
“We’ve been pretty consistent in what we get from federal and state government,” Lahanas said.
Lahanas said the city was on a much more ambitious schedule about 15 years ago. The state economy took a downturn after 2001 and has been on a steady decline since then.
“We would supplement that local and federal money from our general fund, but we have to stop doing that because of the economy,” he said. “We haven’t been able to allocate money on the general fund on a regular basis.”
Lahanas said East Lansing gets $800,000 a year for a street project and about $1 million for a big project. The latter goes through tri-county regional planning, which includes Ingham and Clinton county.
Tri-county allocates money to each county, but Lahanas said there is no guarantee that East Lansing will always receive money for a project.
East Lansing is doing emergency pothole repairs, which will continually be worked on throughout the spring.
“For the most part, it won’t be reconstruction of the streets, it will be patching,” Lahanas said.
He said a $1 million road project would reconstruct a little less than a mile of a street, which includes reconstructing and doing work on the curbs and gutters, but not all curbs and gutters.
Since East Lansing’s five-year financial forecast and the economy has shown some positive signs, Lahanas said the city has more money to allocate to roads.
“We will be focusing more on infrastructure this summer and next summer because we will be allocating more general fund money for the first time-really to more roads,” Lahanas said.
