County Engineer Larry Britt told the Board of Supervisors Monday that Lafayette County officials will be hard-pressed to secure adequate funding for bridge repairs in the upcoming months.
The Local System Bridge Replacement and Rehabilitation Program (LSBP) has financially assisted all 82 counties in Mississippi since the 1990s, but after state legislators decided not to fund the program for Fiscal Year 2018, money is running out.
State lawmakers reached an agreement in late March on a $250 million bond package for FY 2019, which begins July 1. Of that bond package, $50 million will be allocated to the LSBP program. But some state and county leaders are saying it’s not enough.
“We depend on the state. We’ve got to have some money to help fix [the bridges],” Britt said. “It never hurts to let your legislators know that we really need that help.”
Gov. Phil Bryant ordered the closing of three Lafayette County bridges (located on County Roads 369, 424 and 381), along with numerous other bridges around the state, last week. The three Lafayette County bridges have been under repair since Monday morning, Britt said.
One bridge has a few stringers, which are steel beams that support the weight of traffic crossing a bridge, that need to be repaired, and two bridges have excess asphalt that needs to be removed.
“We’ve got to get that excess asphalt off,” Britt said. “They call it ‘dead load,’ which means it’s there all the time, and then [the bridge] can’t carry the ‘live load,’ which is vehicular traffic, because of the weight of the ‘dead load.’”
With plans for even more bridge repairs, Britt hopes to secure adequate LSBP funding.
“It’s been one of the best programs,” Britt told the supervisors. “[There] are seven bridges that we currently have programmed [with LSBP] and basically have money for.”
As for the others, Britt said, “We’ll continue to work on those if they’ll give us some more LSBP funds.”
District 1 Supervisor Kevin Frye added that Lafayette County has become reliant on state funding sources for upkeep of the bridges.
“When the state chooses not to fund LSBP at the level that they have historically funded and not to increase the funding sources to the counties, that puts a stretch on our county … just like every other county,” Frye said.
If state leaders don’t resolve this funding issue, Frye said in a separate interview with HottyToddy.com, county leaders only have one way to turn.
“The only recourse the county has is to raise property taxes,” Frye said. “What I hope people start to understand is they’ve got to elect legislators who are willing to tackle this problem in Jackson. If they don’t, then their local leaders [have] no choice. We’ll have to raise taxes. I suppose the other choice is start closing the roads and say, ‘OK, this is no longer a county road. We’re not going to maintain it anymore.’ That’s not such an easy thing to do when people live on roads, and there are some rules about closing roads anyway.”
The state didn’t allocate any money to LSBP last year but tried to make up for the difference with a $50 million allocation for FY 2019. Divided among 82 counties, $50 million doesn’t go far. The state’s counties oversee 52,000 miles of roadways and about 9,865 bridges.
“We have 150 [bridges] in just one county. I mean, c’mon,” Frye said. “If you just do some quick napkin math, it’s pretty easy to understand that you can’t build a bridge with that. It’s not helpful.”
Steve Gray, director of governmental affairs for the Mississippi Association of Supervisors, said acquiring grants or funding for infrastructure isn’t so easy. There are several costs and processes to follow.
“It’s not as simple as just getting money and building bridges,” Gray said. “You have to acquire the right-of-way, and that’s a process. You have to have engineering design; that’s a process. All these things cost [money] before you actually get to the labor of constructing or repairing. You have to acquire those things before you move forward on bridges that may need to be replaced totally.”
State lawmakers are in discussions to resolve the statewide funding issue. Gray said the potential impact of inadequate funding is more severe than some people realize.
“We’re hoping that something is done in terms of emergency funding,” Gray said. “It’s that serious and spread out across the state.”
By Randall Haley, Editor-in-Chief of HottyToddy.com. She can be reached at randall.haley@hottytoddy.com.
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