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More on the 2% Tax Plan
for Rural Jeff Davis Parish Roads
This thing is a joke!
When you look at Phase 1, of the proposed road improvement plan, by itself, there is no real rhyme or reason for many of the locations to receive pavement. It’s not until you look at Phases 2 & 3, that the plan comes together and makes more sense. Unfortunately, phases 2&3 are not guaranteed, so it would be prudent to only look at phase 1 at face value. In the previous article, it was mentioned that Lantz road is being paved for no other reason than the fact that a police juror lives on that road. Otherwise it should be a low priority phase 2 or 3 project as it only has 10 homes per mile, as opposed to an average of 21 homes per mile in many other locations.
Likewise, the half mile stretch of Ponderosa road is being paved at a cost of $63,250.00, with 4 homes in this half-mile stretch or for an average of 8 homes per mile. This is a priority project on phase 1. The Police Juror, who lives on Lantz road has a family member that lives on Ponderosa. So we begin to see that the selection of roads are not based on real data they can defend such as traffic and HPM calculations. The “Homes Per Mile” calculation is the most fair method of determining which road gets prioritized. Traffic data is also important and I presume was never used in these decisions.
If you set up monitoring for traffic data on a road you want to pave, then you need to set up monitoring on several other roads to get comparative data. In cases where the Police Jury claims they had high traffic I would bet my last dollar they did not use comparative data from other roads in the same area, traveling the same direction. What road is the most used as a cut-across from Hwy 26 to Hwy 102 in District 8. I would bet Grand Marais, or Koll Road. A comparison of those 3, plus combining homes per mile data, would determine how to prioritize those roads. This is data, that the Police Jury could have used in defense of their decisions instead of answering questions with the generic answer of “we want more bang for our buck”. The Police Jury finds itself having difficulty in defending it’s decisions on the prioritization of road repairs. That’s because it is politically driven decisions and not founded on common sense.
One Juror spoke up and stated that there is no money to maintain the roads properly. “It costs $4000.00 to put fresh gravel on a road." Unfortunately, this Juror did not read his own data being distributed. In phase 1, District 8 there are only 2 roads getting gravel, These 2 roads which run into each other will receive gravel at a cost of .378 cents per foot. Using THEIR data - 5,280 feet X .378 = $1995.84 for a mile of fresh gravel. Are we to believe that it costs $4000.00 for 1 mile of gravel without the tax and $1995.84 with the passage of this tax? It’s obvious the Police Juror was not aware of the pricing on their own gravel projects, and should have let the Parish engineer answer all the questions. After all, that was what he was paid to do while they hide behind him.
Economic Development of an area is important in sustaining the infrastructure such as roads and bridges. In rural areas this economic development often comes in slow incremental steps. The police jury shows $10,000.00 in revenue for economic development. On the expense side they spent $928.00 for 2005. This is a good indicator of what’s wrong. Not much effort toward economic development. The Police Jury spent $577,079.00 on Road Repairs and Maintenance in 2005. This is an expense that went directly to the roads. At $2000.00 per mile of gravel this was enough to re-gravel 289.14 miles of roads or they could have resurfaced 13.61 miles of blacktop. This is based on data they provided from the meetings. Where has the money been going?As usual...this is just my opinion. Yours may vary