By John Estridge
Newly elected Franklin County Council Member Brian Patterson asked a question about how many lighted warning signs the county has at slabs.
The subsequent answers may have surprised him concerning the realities of county funding and current costs.
Patterson asked the question near the end of the Tuesday night, February 23, council meeting. He said some constituents had asked him that question, and he had passed over the slabs at Bushy and Yellow Bank roads that day. The water was up and flowing across the slabs due to snow melt and those slabs were without lighted warning signs.
The question was directed at Franklin County Commission President Tom Linkel, who was at the podium talking about the replacement of a county dump truck, where the former one had been destroyed by fire.
Linkel was unable to immediately give a complete answer to Patterson’s question, but promised to do research. He came up with an answer as to cost early the next day.
His answers the night of the meeting and with his subsequent research are Franklin County currently has five LED signs. There are four LED signs at two locations: Bullfork low-water crossing and Pipe Creek low-water crossing. One is in stock and one was destroyed by vandalism. Linkel said vandalism to county highway road signs, including the lighted warning signs, is a major problem and seemingly has always been a problem.
The four lighted warning signs were put in place following Dec. 31, 2018, when a woman was swept off the Pipe Creek low-water crossing and killed during a flood. Her GPS took her down the road, and she was unfamiliar with it. It was at night.
There are 23 slabs in the county. To install LED low-water crossing signs at all low-water crossings in Franklin County, it is estimated to cost $110,000 for sign installation in addition to annual maintenance costs and continued replacement due to vandalism, commissioners communicated on Wednesday.
“The commissioners’ goal, as funding becomes available, is to eliminate one low-crossing location per year and install a bridge in its place,” the commissioners said in an email on Wednesday.
While a good intention, real-world finances may make that goal impossible. Commissioner Tom Wilson was first elected as a commissioner in the 1990s with a primary goal of eliminating low-water crossings in the county. This came after a young mother and her children were swept off a slab and drowned about 30 years ago in the western part of the county.
However, the grim reality was Wilson’s goal was outside the county’s relatively meager revenue in highway funds.
Just the Bushy and Yellow Bank roads’ low-water crossings’ replacement is a multi-million dollar task. And if the county would attempt to build the bridges with federal grant money administered by the state, the cost would escalate even more as the bridges would have to be built to high federal standards. With these grants, the county must pay 20 percent of the costs.
Commissioners were soundly criticized for constructing a new bridge to replace slabs on Stockpile Road. Many said it was an interstate bridge in the middle of the country, thus wasting money. However, the commissioners were forced to have a bridge designed and constructed to meet federal standards because the design and construction were 80 percent funded by federal grants.
There is more to building an apparatus than to just span a stream. The bridge must be high enough to survive, at the minimum, 100-year floods. Approaches have to be engineered to meet that height and to also allow safe approaches to the bridge.
One slab on East Walnut Fork Road is badly deteriorated and may soon become impassible. But, it is on a dead-end road with one home beyond the slab. What should be done with that? And with talking about bridge construction, one must take into account the current county roads. It is estimated to cost $900,000 just to fix flood damage on River Road at Gobles Creek.
Thus, this is one dilemma, which continues to perplex both county council and county commissioners.
