Business Parkway is rated in serious condition by a survey of Douglas roads conducted by the Carson Area Regional Planning Organization.
Applied Pavement Technology photo
For every mile of paved road that Douglas County maintains there is another mile that the county never accepted for maintenance for a variety of reasons, commissioners learned at a three-hour workshop on April 30.
According to a chart presented at the workshop there are 189 miles of paved roads accepted for maintenance by Douglas County, the same number as have not been accepted.
Of the county’s roads, 43 miles are grindings maintained by the county while the county maintains 9.6 miles of gravel road.
Just operating the roads will cost the county $1.5 million next year.
The backlog for road maintenance is up to $60 million, County Manager Jenifer Davidson said at the workshop.
The county’s regional roads aren’t in too bad a shape after spending $24 million to rebuild several of them over the past 11 years.
Much of that work was done after county commissioners passed a nickel gas tax which funded a bond that resulted in paving of several regional roads.
Douglas is budgeting for $4.5 million for road improvements next year, which could reconstruct slightly more than three miles of road reconstruction or overlay seven miles.
Funding local roads is a bit more of a question, though.
Two-thirds of the county’s residents live in either a town or improvement district that pays to maintain roads. The towns of Gardnerville, Genoa and Minden maintain 46 miles of roads in the county. The several general improvement districts maintain 137 miles of local roads.
Davidson reviewed findings produced in 2013 by the Road Funding Task Force, which asserted that regional road maintenance should be funded with regional sources, while local road maintenance should be funded by local groups.
At the time the task force proposed road districts for those areas, like Johnson Lane, Fish Springs and Ruhenstroth where residents are entirely dependent on county resources to repair roads in their communities.
Commission Chairwoman Sharla Hales pointed out that in some of the communities, residents might prefer gravel roads.
“I think that’s a valid choice and I’d like to give them that choice,” she said.