By Larry Lannan
Fishers is facing a road crisis on two fronts. In the western part of town, the roadways are nearing their 20-year expected lifespan and will need resurfacing. In the newly annexed areas to the east, there are many streets made up of “chip and seal” county roads.
In a recent work session, Fishers Town Manager (and mayor elect) Scott Fadness told the town council additional subdivisions in the eastern part of town are seeing construction vehicles and regular traffic volumes far beyond what those roads were built to withstand.
What about the impact fees Fishers collects from developers of new subdivisions? According to Fadness, those funds can only go to “infrastructure expansion” and cannot be used for maintenance costs. In other words, impact fee money cannot be used to repave an existing road, the road would have to be expanded to utilize those funds.
Finding money for maintenance is one of the town’s (and next year, city’s) budget challenges. Fadness called finding money to resurface current roads the “most dire” road issue.
Fadness told council members the challenge is to not only provide money to expand and build-out existing roadways, but also find money for maintenance needed on existing streets and roads.
One place Fishers may be able to fund road maintenance in the short term is from cash reserves. Fadness said Fishers will begin 2015 with $16.1 million in cash reserves. Normal budgeting parameters would only require a cash reserve of about $11.2 million.
That leaves some flexibility for Fishers to potentially dip into the cash reserves and fund badly needed road maintenance, at least for now.
Jeff Hill, Fishers Director of Engineering, provided council members with a map identifying the best and worst roadways on a color-coded scale.
Building and maintaining streets and roads is one of the basic responsibilities of local government. There is a clear gap between the need for money to handle this and the actual funding available based on state law.
Fadness told the council state officials are aware of this gap.
“(The state) has had a number of studies commissioned that shows the infrastructure funding gap that exists today,” Fadness said. “There are a lot of different conversations about how we’re going to go about finding enough revenue to maintain this.”
Fishers will be talking to state lawmakers about ensuring the money is there to take care of our local roads.
