Commissioner: highway funds falling behind
By Kevin O’Brien
State officials are asking the Marathon County Highway Department to scale back routine maintenance projects on state highways due to a persistent lack of adequate funding, highway commissioner Jim Griesbach said recently.
At a county Infrastructure Committee on Dec. 7, Griesbach said the county was more than 14 percent over its 2023 allotment of funds through the Department of Transportation’s annual Routine Maintenance Agreement (RMA). The $3.4 million in the RMA is supposed to cover most of the county’s costs for maintaining state highways within the county, but he said that number has stayed the same for the past four years while prices keep going up.
Griesbach made it clear that the DOT will always reimburse the county for its costs, even if they go above the $3.4 million allotment, but the agency is discouraging the county from doing certain work.
“They’re already regulating what we’re doing for projects on our state system,” he said. “Without that proper funding, we are going to start seeing a reduction of service on those state highways.”
Under existing agreements, the state is supposed to cover 90 percent of highway maintenance costs, but Griesbach said the actual reimbursement amount for Marathon County is closer to 62 percent. Based on the 90 percent figure, the county should be getting $5.5 million instead of $3.4 million, he said.
The RMA is supposed to cover the county’s costs for snowplowing, ditchmowing, pothole-filling, and other routine maintenance on state highways, but Griesbach said snow removal alone used up over half the annual budget by April of 2023.
“We can’t stay status quo and get everything done,” he said.
Supervisor John Robinson wondered
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what the county could do to get more funding.
“I think the public wants those roads maintained,” he said. “We routinely hear complaints – in particular, we were hearing them on STH 29 in the Edgar area.”
When he gets phone calls, Griesbach said he advises people to contact the DOT or state lawmakers, including Sen. Cory Tomcyzk (R-Mosinee), who chairs the Committee on Transportation and Local Government.
“Let them know in Madison,” he said. “That’s where it’s got to start.”
Supervisor Gary Gisselman suggested that the committee invite Sen. Tomcyzk and other local legislators in for a discussion so “they know what we’re up against.”
Griesbach said some counties are reluctant to sign their RMAs for 2024 because of the inadequate funding, but he’s never heard of a county refusing to renew the agreement.
The county does have leverage because state officials realize that county highway departments are really the only entities capable of maintaining state highways, Griesbach said, but the DOT sets the funding levels.
“At the end of the day, it’s the state’s system,” he said. “They dictate the level of service. They dictate what maintenance they want done.”
The committee ultimately voted to approve the 2024 maintenance agreement, but the motion says county officials will communicate their concerns about inadequate funding to state officials and discuss the issue further at a future meeting.
Robinson said only doing 62 percent of the needed maintenance work is not sustainable.
“If you don’t do that routine maintenance, it becomes a reconstruction and the quality of the road is compromised,” he said.
