Kenton County is evaluating what roads could receive money for needed repairs from the state of Kentucky’s Rural and Secondary Roads program.
Each year, counties, incorporated cities and unincorporated urban places are given county and municipal road aid for the construction, reconstruction and maintenance of county roads and city streets.
Typically, a Rural and Municipal Aid representative from the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet presents recommended projects to a county’s fiscal court. After analyzing each request, the legislative body then approves or denies the recommendations.
Andy Yeager, a transportation engineer supervisor with the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet, gave this year’s presentation to the Kenton County Fiscal Court on April 22. Yeager works out of KYTC’s District 6 office in Fort Mitchell, which serves 11 counties in and around Northern Kentucky.
The state of Kentucky allocated $678,511 of road aid to Kenton County, marking a 7% rise from last year, as reported by Yeagar. Of this amount, $219,000 is designated for routine maintenance and traffic services, like repairing potholes, which the county provides to the state under their agreement.
In addition, $135,000 in “flex funds” from the Rural and Secondary Roads program is set aside for road resurfacing projects. The fiscal court must also approve the use of flex funds. Flex fund amounts are determined by the state’s maintenance division, which assesses the condition of the state roads in each county. The money goes toward financing the necessary upkeep of the roads throughout the fiscal year.
In total, the county has $388,777 available for state resurfacing projects. This number comes from adding the $219,000 worth of routine maintenance and traffic services and $135,000 in flex funds.
The first project recommended by Yeager was the resurfacing of Rich Road, a five-mile-long roadway that runs from KY-17 in Piner to KY-177 in Morning View. The estimated cost of the project is $409,200. Yeager said the county could use the aforementioned road aid funds, in addition to a portion of the flex funds, to finance the project.
Kenton County Public Works Director Spencer Stork said the sections of Rich Road are “in pretty bad shape.”
“These are sections that we maintain for the state as well, and they are in rough shape,” Stork said.
Yeager said that if Kenton County chooses not to use the flex funds for the Rich Road resurfacing, they could instead resurface a 1.2-mile stretch of Staffordsburg Road in Independence that runs from KY-16 to Visalia Road. The estimated cost of the project is $122,930.
Kenton County Administrator Joe Shriver noted that county public works crews are not under an obligation to provide maintenance to all state-owned roads, but rather only to state-owned roads in unincorporated Kenton County. Unincorporated Kenton County mainly encompasses more rural areas of the county, rather than the urbanized and suburban areas in the county’s north.
“I just want to make that clear to folks that you know our agreement with the state isn’t maintaining roads all over Kenton County,” Shriver said. “It’s purely what makes sense to maintain.”
Moreover, Shriver explained that the maintenance agreement between Kenton County and KYTC materialized after county officials noticed that the agency didn’t have the capacity to conduct snow removal operations on some state-owned roads.
“It all came about with snow removal, where we were passing by state routes that weren’t our obligation to maintain, but you guys didn’t have the opportunity to get to them yet, so this, this whole agreement, grew out of that relationship,” Shriver said.
The next steps are for the fiscal court to review the recommendations provided by Yeager, then take action at a future meeting.
