ALBION — About a quarter of the bridges in Noble County are in need of major rehabilitation or total replacement, but in recent years the county has been losing ground in the maintenance battle.
After the last round of bridge inspections in 2013, the county was able to replace two bridges that needed it. But as inspectors reviewed the county’s 64 bridges this year, they found five new structures that needed to be added to the “fix” list.
That’s not the direction the county wants to be heading in, but current funding constraints are making it tough to catch up. Replacing one smaller bridge, such as the 45-foot Bridge 24 over Builder Ditch on C.R. 950, can cost $350,000 — just about all the money the county collects in one year in the bridge replacement fund.
Tackling something bigger, like the $2 million price tag on the Pigeon Street bridge in Ligonier, isn’t even feasible, not without grant money from the state. That pot of money, too, is shrinking, on top of being highly competitive as 92 counties and hundreds of cities and towns apply for limited funds.
Noble County needs about $15.6 million to fix all of the bridges currently on the maintenance list.
The county collects about $415,000 in taxes per year for bridges.
Even if the county received grants that pay for 80 percent of the cost of construction on all of the most expensive bridges in need of work, the county still would need $5.2 million to get everything up to par.
Noble County officials are working on a new long-range bridge maintenance plan to plot out how to fix the 15 bridges that are presently in need of major work, county engineer Zachary Smith said. If the county can’t stay on top of maintenance, the worst-case scenario could include having to close roads if bridges aren’t brought up to standards.
“Our focus is to get some of these smaller bridges taken out through local design and build on in-house replacement by downsizing,” Smith said. “Attack the expensive things with grant money and do everything in-house as cost effective as possible, doing a design instead of replacing in-kind.”
Part of the reason that bridges are becoming a major issue now is because they’re not getting the life expectancy that was forecast when they were built, Smith said. That means several are now rapidly nearing the end of their lives and are in need of costly repair or replacement work, he said.
“One of the big issues with bridges, especially in Indiana, is box beam structures were very popular for construction in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s. And these were designed to have a 75-year life, and they’re lasting 40 or 50 years only,” Smith said.
In order to tackle all the maintenance needed, the county’s bridges are roughly divided into three categories, each with a different plan of action for how to fix them.
Small bridges can potentially be swapped out for new structures that would remove them from the bridge inventory, saving money on inspections. Midsized bridges could be designed and replaced in-house by the county.
The biggest bridges and most costly projects will require state grant money, so the county will have to plan years ahead for which ones are most in need of repair and apply for funding.
The county has 64 bridges in a range of sizes, lengths and designs. Bridges, as defined by highway codes, encompass more than what the average person probably thinks of: an elevated road crossing a waterway.
Any structure with a span of more than 20 feet in length gets classified as a bridge, Smith said. For example, a series of four culvert pipes on Sherman Street near South Side Elementary School in Kendallville is technically a bridge.
Some of those nontraditional bridges could be addressed by simply taking them out and replacing them with something smaller and easier to maintain, Smith said. For example, if the county could replace that series of pipe culverts on Sherman Street with a smaller box culvert under the 20-foot limit, that no longer would be classified as a bridge and wouldn’t need to be inspected.
Those projects could potentially be done cheaply, ranging from $25,000 to $75,000, depending on the project.
Inspections on all the bridges in the county are done at least every two years. This year, the county had to spend about $33,000 to cover its portion of the $166,000 contract, with the rest paid for by the federal government. But inspection costs are going to go up in the future, so getting some of those bridges off the inventory now would be a cost-saving move, Smith said.
“In 2017, a new federal requirement comes out, and if you have a bridge rated 3 or less in any category, then it has to go on an annual inspection. So these costs are going to go up, considering how many bridges we have in poor condition,” Smith said.
The midsized bridges are ones you might drive over when crossing a large ditch or other waterway, and can’t simply be replaced by a culvert. Bridge 24 on C.R. 950E, for example, is at the top of a hill several feet above Builder Ditch, so it can’t be swapped for something smaller.
Those types of bridges typically can be replaced for $250,000 to $350,000, which means the county likely can do only one per year.
Local bridge funding comes from property taxes raised in the cumulative capital development fund. In the past, 100 percent of those funds were being committed to bridges, but in recent years the money had been split, with 60 percent going to bridges and 40 percent to the Noble County Jail.
The county recently changed to a 75/25 split, which should increase bridge funding to approximately $415,000 per year.
Larger bridges, like Pigeon Street in Ligonier or railroad bridges on county roads 225E, 400E or 175N, are much costlier endeavors, Smith said. With price tags topping $1 million or more, grants are the only feasible way to get work done, unless the county plans to save all its bridge funding for several years.
State grants from the Local Public Agency (LPA) program cover 80 percent of the cost of construction, which means the county still would have to devote an entire year of bridge funding to pay its matching portion. For example, the local match on the Ligonier bridge project is $409,000.
The state usually awards those grants about four years in advance of when the money actually will be available, meaning the county has to be preparing some initial designs and estimates on those bridges well in advance, Smith said.
The LPA grant process is highly competitive, and Smith said he’s recently been getting the impression that those funds are tightening up a little bit. The state has offered to pay Noble County’s matching portion for the Pigeon Street project if the county can wait until 2019 to do it, instead of 2018 as was originally planned, Smith said.
The grant money the state has available comes from gas taxes. Nationwide, gas tax revenue has been shrinking due to people buying less fuel because they have more fuel-efficient vehicles, Indiana Department of Transportation Northeast District spokeswoman Nichole Hacha-Thomas said.
That money also doesn’t go as far as it used to, since gas taxes have remained flat while inflation and increased material costs have made road work pricier, she said.
“The percentage of money taken from the gas tax has stayed the same as construction costs go up, up and up. We’re not able to do as much as we were able to,” Hacha-Thomas said.
Some of the criteria that are taken into account during the state’s scoring process include daily traffic, location, whether the road is a main thoroughfare or connector to major routes, and safety, Hacha-Thomas said.
Competition for grants is a major challenge for less-populated areas such as Noble County. The LPA funding is one large pot, to which every town, city and county in the state can apply. Although the state awards millions in grants to dozens of communities, it’s not typical for a non-metro area to get funded for more than one or two projects, Hacha-Thomas and Smith said.
“I’ve seen some people get two projects and some get none. One is average, unless you have some really competitive projects,” Smith said.
If the county can plan to carefully navigate the troubled waters of funding now, bridges shouldn’t be an issue again for several decades, Smith said. If not, drivers might end up coming to barriers and “Bridge Out” signs on county roads.
“You’re looking at a 50- to 70-year design life. If we don’t address things in the next 10 years, it will be a large problem. I could imagine closing even one of these bridges could have negative effects,” Smith said.