County cuts road maintenance credit

Posted November 13, 2024

Local funding for Foster County townships has effectively been cut in half. The Foster County Commission carried a motion to do so at their regular meeting on Thursday, Nov. 7.

Since 2022, the 18 townships of Foster County have each been receiving an annual credit of about $4,500 from their county government, which has gone toward blading and snow removal bills.

Combined, that's approximately $80,000 a year the county hands out to its townships, and now commissioners are looking to cut that number to less than $40,000.

Commissioner David Utke said the credit is essentially a discount on blade and snow removal costs for townships, and it's a scheme thought up over two years ago to replace the county's old "share roads" program.

That decades-long program had the county and townships evenly splitting all maintenance bills for township roads, and Utke said it got to be a "bookkeeping nightmare" for both the townships and their county auditor.

So, the county ended that program and instead of spending $80-$85K on township roads, they simply gave the townships an $80-$85K credit for blading and snow removal costs.

Half of that amount was evenly split among the 18 townships, and the other half was split among the townships based on their number of road miles.

According to a breakdown provided by Utke showing how much credit each township was given in 2022, the largest township received about $5,200, while the smallest brought in closer to $4,200.

However, following Thursday's meeting, every township will now receive an even $2,000 credit in 2025 (totaling $36,000 all together), and commissioners seemed to agree that 2025 would be the final year townships receive any such credit at all.

"I'm still a firm believer [the townships] are their own entities, and I don't know why we subsidize them," said Commissioner Alan Scanson, who was the first to propose making a change during Thursday's meeting.

"... Nobody else in the state does this and I still don't understand why we're doing it, especially when the people gave us mills to fix county roads and then we're putting part of it out to the townships."

Both Commissioner Becky Hagel and Commission Chairman David Utke agreed with Scanson, and made the point that townships are able to raise mills to pay for the maintenance of their own roads.

Utke added that the reason for making a change largely has to do with rising costs in other areas of the budget.

"We've had the same inflation everybody else has, so I think this has to go away," said Utke. "I think we helped the townships as long as we could, but we're responsible to other areas of the budget too and when it's coming out of the general fund that affects everything."

Commissioner Pat Copenhaver expressed some concern about the timing, and whether townships would have enough time to potentially raise their own mill levies to account for having less credit.

Commissioner Scanson said the commission informed townships as recently as last year to "be looking at your mill levies and get your budgets in line" because the blading and snow removal credit isn't guaranteed.

With that, a motion was made to decrease the credit given to townships to $2,000, and that motion was carried unanimously.

According to Foster County Auditor Ellen Roundy, the change in credit will take effect on January 1, 2025.

Meanwhile, the commission also approved a related but separate road maintenance contract between the townships and counties, which will take effect on April 1 of next year.

That newly proposed contract is the same as the previous year's, which every township signed. The $2,000 credit being offered by Foster County isn't part of the contract itself, but the credit is only available to townships that sign it.

Each township will need to sign the contract if they also want a discounted hourly rate for blading and snow removal of $140 per hour.

The commission's next regular meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 19 at 3:30 p.m. in the Foster County Courthouse.