Departments can't keep pace with nature's fury in Wisconsin

A heavy winter snowfall forced Dave Lambert to delay four miles of highway construction work until next year, and recent floods might cost him another four miles.

Lambert, Grant County's highway commissioner, said he removed from his construction docket this year's round of seal-coating to help cover the estimated $400,000 of work to repair flood damage. He said there are about six spots where between 100 and 300 feet of pavement washed away in the floods.

At the start of the year, he said, the department planned to mill and repave 25 miles of county highways and, depending on how flood- repair bills stack up, Grant County might have to settle for just 17 miles.

"You just do what you can with what you have," Lambert said, "and if you don't have the money, you just take it out of construction."

The state Department of Transportation on Saturday night sent an e-mail asking county highway departments to tally their flood- repair bills. County highways can't get Federal Emergency Management Agency money, but the Federal Highway Administration will reimburse counties for some of the work.

The magnitude of repairs needed for County Highway A in Lake Delton is enough to make the state eligible for the federal highway money, said Robert Fasick, WisDOT highway operations engineer.

Even with federal money coming in to reimburse counties for large projects such as Highway A, the bigger budget problem is from the many small jobs county departments must perform, said Daniel Fedderly, executive director of the Wisconsin County Highway Association. Shoulder repair work and other small jobs add up and, in the best cases, eat up maintenance budgets. At worst, it means projects will be delayed, he said.

This year, the problem is compounded because the snow gave county departments a lot of minor repair jobs, he said.

"Those are the costs that, in the long term, tend to put the greatest press on the departments and the counties," Fedderly said, "because you still need to fund those, but there's no outside source for it."

Crawford County's crews had just started construction projects to repair last year's flood damage when the rains hit again, said Highway Commissioner Dennis Pelock. He's facing about $390,000 in repair work to county roads, a light load compared to the $1 million in damage the floods caused last year, he said.

Pelock said it's frustrating to have projects get rained out two years in a row.

"We didn't get a lot done last year," he said. "We had just got into doing pavement, and then it started to rain."

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