LOST revenue 'whitetops' plenty of Linn County roads

LINN COUNTY - It's easy to hear grumbling about Cedar Rapids' city streets, but not so much so about Linn County's rural roads.

That may be in part because the Linn County Board of Supervisors and the county's Secondary Road Department have been using 90 percent of the revenue generated by the county's piece of the existing 1-percent local-option sales tax in Linn County for road improvements, while the city of Cedar Rapids has been using 90 percent of its revenue from its much-larger piece of the sales tax revenue for flood recovery work, and none for street work.

The local-option sales tax, which expires on June 30, 2014, in Cedar Rapids, Marion, Hiawatha, Robins and Fairfax, has been raising about $4.5 million a year in unincorporated Linn County for road and bridge work, with much of the money being used to improve roads already paved in one form or another but in need of fixes.

Most of the new paving work - 15 to 20 miles on average for each of the five years that the sales tax is being collected in the metro area and countywide - has involved the road-building process called “whitetopping,” best understood in relation to blacktopping.

Whitetopping

Whitetopping overlays existing pavement with concrete while blacktopping uses asphalt, said Steve Gannon, Linn County engineer and head of the county's Secondary Road Department.

Gannon - who is a structural engineer with a bit of a self-professed bias toward concrete - reports that Linn County began using concrete overlays over existing asphalt, seal coat and concrete roads some years ago as price disparities between concrete and asphalt that once favored asphalt began to vanish.

Gannon says his approach to whitetopping adds a 6- to 8-inch layer of new concrete over existing pavement at a cost of between $250,000 and $300,000 a mile, which he says is less than half the cost of building a new concrete road from scratch to the same thickness. The savings comes, in part, because of the ability to use what already is in place. There is no extra expense, for instance, to grade the road bed, and the work proceeds quickly because construction machinery can set up on existing pavement, Gannon said.

“You can see there's a huge savings in going over what is there,” he says.

A big advantage, too, is that he says the new layer of concrete will last up to 50 years with minimal maintenance, while he says a new layer of asphalt would require more maintenance and a new surface in 15 or so years.

The cost-benefit analyses over time between concrete, asphalt, seal coat, gravel and dirt can go on and on, Gannon said. But for Linn County's current road-improvement work, whitetopping has come out on top of the analysis to fix already paved road, he says.

“And when you're done, there is little a guy can see to think that you're not on a brand-new concrete road,” Gannon said.

County differences

The calculations in rural Linn County, he said, are different from those in cities like Cedar Rapids, where street fixes often can require removing the pavement to get to water or sewer infrastructure beneath streets that needs upgrading at the same time as the street.

Even so, he points to a stretch of Edgewood Road SW south of Highway 30 in which Linn County used whitetopping in a project with the city of Cedar Rapids right next to a stretch of road that was constructed from the ground up. The whitetopping cost half as much, Gannon said.

John Harris, chairman of the Linn County Board of Supervisors, says the concrete overlay program brings with it low, long-term road maintenance costs while revenue from the local-option sales tax is in place to pay for the work.

“If LOST goes away, it's not catastrophic because we're not creating a future maintenance requirement for these roads,” Harris said.

Supervisor Brent Oleson, whose supervisor district like Harris' covers some of the rural stretches of Linn County, says federal stimulus money in recent years also has provided some road construction money to go along with LOST funds.

“There are areas in the northern part of the county where long stretches of roads have been redone,” Oleson says. “So, I'm pleased with the progress. People have noticed. The roads are good and getting better.”

Rural road plan

Harris, Oleson and Gannon talk about the county's approach to its rural road grid, which some years ago was designed to put every rural resident within three miles of some kind of paved road. The idea now is to get everyone within about a mile and a half of a paved road. In the process, the county also is seal-coating some rock roads when traffic counts warrant, a move that means less maintenance as well, Gannon says.

Linn County is responsible for 1,157 miles of road, 800 miles of which are rock roads, 50 “mud” roads, as Gannon puts it, and the rest paved roads. Some of the paved, which can include seal coating, are in rural subdivisions, he notes.

Gannon, a historian of a kind when it comes to Linn County's rural roads, talks about the commemoration in recent years of what he calls the “seedling mile” - the first mile of pavement put down in the county in 1918 and 1919 outside of Mount Vernon as a demonstration of what the future might bring.

It took until this February for Linn County to reach the milestone of 100 miles of concrete roads in the county, a distinction that brought an award from the Iowa Concrete Paving Association and the Portland Cement Association, Gannon said.

LOST future

The award isn't blurring Gannon's view of the future.

Most of the local-option sales tax revenue that comes to jurisdictions in Linn County comes from the tax collected in the Cedar Rapids metro area, where the tax ends on June 30, 2014, after a 63-month run even as the tax has been extended elsewhere in the county.

As a result, Gannon figures the $4.5 million a year in sales tax revenue he now gets for rural roads and bridges will drop to $500,000 a year in mid-2014. (Voters in unincorporated Linn County also have decided to use 50 percent of any ongoing LOST revenue for roads, down from the current 90 percent that is in place until June 30, 2014.)

But Gannon says he has taken note of rumblings at City Hall in Cedar Rapids.

Last week, City Council member Don Karr stated publicly that some on the council are considering taking another run at extending the local-option sales tax for Cedar Rapids and the metro block, money which Cedar Rapids might use, at least in part, to fix streets.

A successful vote in the metro area would mean additional money ahead for Linn County and its roads and bridges program.

Voters in the metro area defeated the tax extension in May 2011 - by 211 votes out of some 32,000 cast - when Cedar Rapids wanted to use its revenue for flood protection and street repairs. Metro-block voters defeated the tax extension again in March 2012 by 576 votes out of about 27,500 total votes.