Bridge repairs outweigh revenues in Illinois

Aug. 9, 2013
Crumbling infrastructure is forcing municipal engineers and others to stretch their limited money.

As bridges across Central Illinois and the country age and deteriorate, municipal engineers and others are forced to find new ways to stretch their limited money.

Funding for bridges has become a problem for municipalities as the state has taken a larger portion of the motor fuel tax for itself and federal money has been frozen. For counties such as Macon, the tax levy has been left flat for years.

"It's an issue because we're having a huge cut of funds ... everything has been left flat at the same time the cost of materials to build bridges have gone up 200 percent," Macon County Engineer Bruce Bird said.

Municipalities have to show creativity to stretch their allotted money, whether it is repairing parts of the bridge to add additional life or even adding barrels along the edges of the bridge on unsafe areas to dissuade vehicles from adding additional stress on the bridge. But those are just bandages on the actual need to fix the bridge.

Bridges are initially inspected every two years but are inspected more frequently as they get older. The oldest bridges are inspected every three months, Bird said.

Deficient bridges are labeled as such if they requiring significant maintenance, rehabilitation or replacement, according to the Federal Highway Administration 2013 Report Card for America's Infrastructure.

Macon County sees itself as one of the better counties in the area when it comes to percentage of deficient bridges, with 33 of its 345 total bridges, or 9.6 percent, being listed as deficient. That is still above the state average of 8.7 percent of deficient bridges in a county. Macon County, as well as Illinois, is below the 11 percent national average.

Shelby and Christian counties did not fare well in the study, posting two of the three highest percentages of deficient bridges in all 102 Illinois counties.

White County in Southern Illinois was the other county in the bottom three.

Out of 351 bridges in Shelby County, 75 bridges, or 21.4 percent, are listed as deficient. Of the 326 bridges in Christian County, 73, or 22.4 percent, are listed as deficient.

Alan Spesard, the Shelby County engineer, said many of the bridges in the county were built in the 1960s and 1970s and they are all becoming deficient at the same time. Additionally, the county covers a large area for such a small population.

"It's a bad combination ... the need outweighs the revenue," he said.

The lengths of the bridges vary, from small vehicle-wide bridges on county roads to long, busy bridges over waterways.

More than $19 million has been set aside in the past month by Central Illinois counties for construction projects, with the majority being spent on bridge repair or upkeep.

Among the projects are two bridges being replaced in Christian County, deck repairs on a bridge carrying Illinois 16 over the Kaskaskia River near Shelbyville and a bridge over Salt Creek about 2.4 miles south of Elkhart Road will be repaired and resurfaced.

Gov. Pat Quinn, a Chicago Democrat, praised the road improvements.

"From Shelbyville to Decatur, these projects will maintain local roadways and improve our infrastructure," Quinn said.

But the money from that project, which has led to the repairs of more than 1,100 bridges, is nearly used up. For Spesard and others, it's just a matter of being smart and identifying what bridges need the most attention.

"We have to look at each bridge and look at what the most economical way to repair or replace them would be," he said.

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