Washington Township Needs to Work on Road Infrastructure

Washington Township has over 150 miles of municipal roads and streets serving our community. They range from major thoroughfares such as Naughright, Pleasant Grove and Parker Roads to heavily traveled residential streets like Ann, Old Farmers and Wherli Roads.

Daily usage includes Police, Fire, First Aid, School buses, commuters, fuel trucks, package delivery vehicles and moving vans. Many of the roads in town were not designed and built to handle the volume of traffic we see today, and road drainage was not a major design issue.

In 1974 the town's population was somewhere between 8-9,000 residents, farms were a major part of land usage and there were roughly 3 residential subdivisions in the town. Today the population is over 18,000 residents, commuters from other towns regularly use several of our roads and the cost of maintaining roads and adding drainage where possible is an expensive proposition.

The Road maintenance and reconstruction portion of the municipal budget has been limited by the poor economy and reduced State aid. State aid for roads for our town generally cover a portion of a single road each year, and the funding is always at risk of elimination. The recent heavy storms have damaged roads that were in need of work but did not rank high enough in the annual DPW priority list to get town funding.

With the annual Town budget process about to begin, what are your thoughts about funding for town roads, which are a major element of our infrastructure?