Bulloch County’s elected commissioners know that the county’s Transportation Department is working hard to maintain roads with limited staffing, some of them told Public Works Director Dink Butler earlier this week.

Reporting to the commissioners Tuesday morning, Butler said the road maintenance workforce was down about 25%. But the Solid Waste Department, also in his division, had about 50% of its workers out for COVID-19 isolation or quarantine and other reasons. So, some workers have been temporarily reassigned from transportation to sanitation.

“I don’t want to make excuses,” Butler said. “Everybody knows with our work conditions and labor force, COVID effects, other illnesses, we’re approximately 25 percent down on labor right now, as far as our daily operations go, and another one was gone this morning.”

Meanwhile, the county has more than $43 million, primarily from the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax and state grants, earmarked to transportation capital improvements and equipment purchases over the next five years. This includes $15 million for resurfacing deteriorating paved roads and a little over $6 million for paving dirt roads, which will make only a small reduction in Bulloch County’s more than 700 miles of unpaved routes.

That’s not counting another 100 or so miles of privately maintained dirt roads in the county sometimes said to be the dirt road capital of Georgia.

Comments heard

Of course, residents who call commissioners to complain usually aren’t asking for future paving, but are often insisting that a dirt road be plowed or that a flooded or gullied spot be fixed, right now.

“Once comment that’s been made to me in the last couple of weeks and to other commissioners is … you don’t get anything done, and I know that’s not true,” said Commissioner Ray Mosley, who had asked that Butler speak at the meeting. “We have constant contact, and I would say that you guys do a good job based on what you have to work with.”

Butler had begun his brief, spoken report with a comment on continuing progress before talking about the workforce absences.

‘Work in progress’

“We have, I think, made a lot of progress in road maintenance since last winter with all of the water,” he said. “We’ve done a lot of ditching, got a lot of culvert pipes cleaned out. The last couple of rains have showed us in some areas how beneficial that’s been. So, that’s a work in progress.”

By “last winter” he meant the winter of 2019-2020, when heavier rains caused major damage to dirt roads. A “really good, core group of  workers” remains with the department after working  60- and 70-hour weeks for several months in 2020, when the  county  also hired outside dump trucks to haul the volume of dirt needed to rebuild  roads in some areas, he said in an interview.

Speaking to the commissioners, Butler noted that delivery has been delayed on the county’s purchase of a new “jetter truck,” as it has been on many things during the pandemic. This is a truck equipped like a big pressure washer to clean out culvert pipes with a jet of water.

The latest report is that it should arrive sometime in March, he said.

Meanwhile, all three of the county’s ditching machines and their operators have been working in the southern end of the county, “the most critical area for ditching and drainage,” Butler said.

Road plow operators are working graders over their usual dirt-road routes when they can, limited by rainy weather and the labor situation. But drainage and safety issues take priority, with the department focusing on keeping roads passable and the roadbed intact, so “smoothness” will sometimes have to wait until later, Butler said.

Workforce issues

At full force, the Transportation Department has 25 field workers and five supervisors who sometimes also operate machinery. The Solid Waste Department has 10 regular workers in the field, most or all of them drivers.

These totals do not include Bulloch County Correctional Institute inmates, who often work in road maintenance. Eight to 10 inmates are available who can operate equipment such as motor graders, backhoes or bulldozers but are not allowed to drive trucks, and a few sometimes work as manual laborers accompanying drivers on solid waste trucks.

But when regular, paid employees are out, this also hinders deployment of inmates, since certain regular employees must be available to supervise them, Butler said Friday.

On the Transportation Department side, the reasons employees were currently away or jobs vacant were “probably 50-50” coronavirus-related and other causes, he said. That department has four or five vacant positions. The Solid Waste Department had just one vacancy but mostly COVID-related absences.

Sanitation priority

“The problem is that we use Transportation (employees) to backfill Solid Waste because it has to take priority,” Butler said.

Interviewed separately, Board of Commissioners Chairman Roy Thompson also said that sanitation is the more urgent need.

“I feel for that department. They’re doing everything in the world they can, particularly with trash collection out of the convenience centers,” Thompson said. “We sort of put that as a priority and – I know a lot of people won’t want to hear this, but – a priority over dirt roads. There again, we’re doing everything we can with dirt roads, but we’ve got to haul the trash out of the centers because we have so much trash.”

Pave more roads?

Asked whether the commissioners might look at shifting a larger share of the county’s T-SPLOST or other funding toward paving dirt roads, Thompson said that funding is not the biggest hindrance to paving in Bulloch County.

“Most people that live on a dirt road do not want it paved,” he said. “Our biggest issue right now is people signing the petition to have their dirt roads paved. They will not sign the petition; they want to live on their dirt road.”

Butler, interviewed separately, said much the same thing. Dirt-road residents often associate paved roads with “more traffic, higher speeds and higher taxes,” Butler said. But he and Thompson noted that dirt roads present continual maintenance and repair costs.

Another story in the near future will describe the county’s priorities for transportation spending and the current T-SPLOST revenue trend.