The City of Plymouth is going for the maximum amount of money from Indiana’s Community Crossings 50-50 matching grant program for street projects. The Plymouth Common Council voted Monday to begin the process of appropriating a million dollars for the local match. That’s the most the state says it will match for each local government entity.
City Attorney Sean Surrisi says the appropriation would increase the city’s flexibility with the program, “It might not be that we would spend that entire million dollars, but we’d be more nimble and ready to react and take advantage of that grant funding.”
To come up with that money, the City of Plymouth will use the entire $550,000 Local Option Income Tax distribution it recently received from the state. The rest of the local money will come from Plymouth’s Rainy Day Fund. The Plymouth Common Council is expected to make an official decision on the appropriation at an upcoming meeting.
Earlier Monday, Plymouth City Engineer Rick Gaul told the Board of Works that the city continues to update its pavement asset management plan, to bring it in compliance with the program’s requirements. “Not only does this affect the 50-50, but it affects your federal funding for the future,” he said. “So if we definitely want to go to federal funding in the future, we need to have this. I guess you would say we had it, we kept track, we kept averages, we did all of that stuff. We just had to flesh it a little bit more with widths and different items like that.”
Gaul estimates that about 46 percent of the city’s pavements were rated good or better. He’s looking to increase that to 66 to 70 percent. He adds that rather than fixing the worst streets first, governments are now being asked to take a more balanced approach to help keep streets at least at their current condition. “Basically, what they’re taking into account is they’re saying, you have x amount of lane miles, in our case 145.08, and next year, you’re going to have a year less life in that 145.08,” he said. “So in order to keep your system up-to-date, you need to put 145.08 or more into it, if you’re going to go and change your entire system.”
Gaul plans to present the plan for board members’ approval at their next meeting.
