More than one way to skin a cat

You’ve gotta give credit where it’s due when someone uses their noggin to figure out a creative solution to a pressing problem. So it goes with the Clark County administrators and financial people who came up with a workable -- and affordable -- way to keep the county’s roads smooth.

Several years back, when the state of Wisconsin stuck its unwelcome nose in counties’ business and declared that they could no longer decide to raise their own property tax rates, budgets suddenly became tight and such burdensome expenses as road maintenance became onerous. A relatively geographically expansive county, Clark County has a lot of rural road miles -- 301 to be exact -- and it quickly became unable to find enough money each year to pave enough to keep them all in decent condition. Whereas the county previously had been on a schedule to pave every mile once every 20 years, it fell to a rate of as high as every 45 years by 2013.

The next year, the county came upon a clever idea. Although still not able to raise its tax rate more than a little each year (depending on if and how much its property value might grow), county planners realized that debt payments are not subject to the tax rate limit. In other words, money borrowed for extraneous needs (i.e., a new building) would not be counted against the limit.

What the county did beginning in 2014 was to short- term borrow money for road paving. It took out a $600,000 loan that year, and since that money was considered a debt, it allowed the county to use it for needed roadwork and still stay within the tax limit. The county actually takes out the loan and pays it back in a matter of about a month, and thus incurs very little loan expense.

Call it a trick, call it taking advantage of a loophole, call it whatever you want, but the technique is working well. The county has “borrowed” $10.4 million over the last seven years, and plans to take out another $2.9 million in 2021, and with those funds has paved 105 miles of its total road system. That has brought the pavement average down from that 45-year level in 2013 to just under 20 (after 15.5 miles are done next summer).

Road maintenance is not a luxury, as citizens count on smooth and safe highways to get them where they’re going. Neither is it cheap, as the going rate for a mile of pavement in 2021 is estimated at $187,097. That cost varies as oil and other prices fluctuate, and has been as high as $222,367 in 2015.

With the need to fix its roads, and the state taking away the local control it needed to get the money for it, Clark County got imaginative and found a means to solve its dilemma. We must give props where they’re due for thinking outside that proverbial box to accomplish what is needed.

Members of the TRG editorial Board include Publisher Kris O’Leary, Editor Dean Lesar, and Carol O’Leary.