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This map was provided by Brion Rhodes, Allen County Engineer. It shows all posted and closed bridges in Ohio.
Fisher Road bridge out in Jackson Township, Allen County. This bridge in Allen County has been closed since 1996 said Brion Rhodes, Allen County Engineer. It has remained closed for 22 years because of a lack of funding. The bridge is on an infrequently used road so repairing it has never been a high priority because there is always something more frequently used that needs repaired first, he said.
Craig J. Orosz | The Lima News
Sign’s on the corner of Fisher and Ada Road in Jackson Township, Allen County.
Craig J. Orosz | The Lima News
LIMA — There is a bridge is Jackson Township on Fisher Road just north of state Route 81 in Allen County that has been closed since 1996. The deck surface has been eroded away by weather and plants grown from cracks in the broken concrete. The bridge structure has been compromised and there is a noticeable lean to one side.
It looks like something out of the History Channel program, “Life After People,” but in this case, people have not gone extinct. The Allen County Engineer’s Office just doesn’t have the funding to fix the bridge because it’s not a high priority, said Allen County Engineer Brion Rhodes. According to Rhodes, there will come a time in the not so distant future when many of the bridges in the region look like the one on Fisher Road.
“Engineers across the country see a fiscal cliff coming now because of aging infrastructure,” Rhodes said. “It’s only going to get worse until funding increases.”
In a press release sent out Jan. 16 concerning the Bridge Investment Act Bill, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) released a list of bridges in Ohio that were in need of repair. According to that list, Allen County is shown to have a total of 70 bridges categorized as functionally obsolete or structurally deficient. Putnam County has 16 bridges in need of repair and Auglaize County has 15.
Brown’s Bridge Investment Act calls for an additional $75 million to be invested into bridge repair projects throughout the country. According to the press release, the bill would include a bipartisan infrastructure package that would help end the bridge repair backlog afflicting the nations infrastructure. I would also all applicants for federal aid to bundle together medium and small bridge projects together which would help speed up repairs.
What does that mean?
The terms functionally obsolete and structurally deficient can be difficult to explain and understand, Rhodes said. Basically, functionally obsolete bridges are those that were built either in the past before modern bridge building standards, such as lane size and approach regulations, were standard, or they were built without modern bridge construction standards in mind.
Functionally obsolete bridges do not necessarily have any structural damage and are not by themselves dangerous. They can, however, cause dangerous situations to happen, Rhodes said.
Structurally deficient bridges do have structural damage but they’re not on the verge of falling down suddenly, he said. Bridges are rated on a safety scale which begins at 10, a brand new bridge, and goes to zero, a potential pile of rubble. Structurally deficient bridges are those that have reached a point where they are still safe and can be maintained but they are on the fast track for replacement when funding is available.
“If they’re not safe, we wouldn’t have them open,” Rhodes said.
Ohio Department of Transportation
The Ohio Department of Transportation is responsible for maintaining, repairing and replacing 14,000 bridges in the state, said ODOT Press Secretary Matt Bruning. The average rating of those bridges is a 7, which is a decent rating, he said. According to a map showing posted and closed Ohio county and Department of Transportation roads created by OpenStreetMap, ODOT is responsible for 11 closed bridges around the state and 15 posted bridges.
Bruning said ODOT receives the bulk of its funding from the Federal Highway Revenue, most of which comes from the federal gas tax, and the State Highway Revenue, which mostly comes from that state gas tax. For 2017, ODOT brought $1.37 billion in revenue in from the federal highway revenue and $1.27 billion from the state highway revenue.
The Federal Government charges a tax of 18.4 cents per gallon of gas and the state charges 28 cents per gallon of gas purchased. ODOT get’s a majority of that tax back for their yearly budget. They get a revenue of 17.5 cents per gallon, totalling $1.1 billion dollars in 2017, from the state gas tax, Bruning said.
Ohio counties receives 3.4 cents of that 28 cents per gallon from the state gas tax which is then divided among all 88 counties. Each county receives .007 cents per gallon of gas purchased from the state gas tax to use for bridge and road maintenance, said Douglas Reinhart, Auglaize County Engineer.
Bruning said ODOT focuses more on preservation and maintenance effort then it does building now.
“Throughout the ‘60s, ’70s and ‘80s, ODOT focused on building the interstate and the systems for it,” he said. “Now that we have finished that project, we’re focused on maintaining the systems that are already in place. We’re trying to take better care of what we have. Every 90 cents of every dollar goes to preservation and maintenance, whether that is replacing a bridge deck or building a new bridge.”
Putnam, Auglaize and Allen Counties
Putnam County is responsible for the upkeep of 264 total bridges with 17 of them structurally deficient, said Michael Lenhart, Putnam County Engineer. Auglaize County cares for 347 bridges, with two bridges structurally deficient and one functionally obsolete, and Allen County handles 377 bridges, with 10 bridges with a posted weight limit and one bridge closed since 1996.
According to the OpenStreetMap, Ohio counties have a total of 59 closed bridges in the state and 1,449 bridges with posted weight limits.
The Ohio gas tax hasn’t increased since 2005, remaining at the set rate of 28 cents per gallon. The tax is not a percent that increase when the price of gas does; it remains the same. It also doesn’t increase to offset the effects of modern, fuel-efficient vehicles, said Reinhart.
In Allen County, their $5 permissive license fee hasn’t increased since 1968. The revenue the Allen County Engineer’s Office receives from the license plate tax hasn’t increase in 30 years, Rhodes said. What has increased in that time is the cost of materials used to maintain and build bridges.
Rhodes said in the early 2000s it cost $25,000 to pave one mile of road with an average paving of one and a half inches. In 2017, it cost $70,000 to use the exact same kind of paving to pave a one-mile stretch of roadway. In 2006, it costed $80 for a load of concrete, said Reinhart. By 2017, the price for the same load of concrete increased to $106. Every material and service needed to maintain and build bridges has steadily increased over 15 years but the revenue used to purchase those material has not, Reinhart said.
Bridges that are structurally deficient and yet can’t be maintained are marked with weight limits, Rhodes said.
“We calculate what the bridge will hold based on the materials and their condition,” he said. “This is what the bridge will take based on they’re calculations. The only way to know for absolute certainty what the bridge would hold is to live test it which would destroy the bridge.”
Weight limits are posted on bridges that are still safe to use but the county can not afford to replace with available funding. Eventually they would need to be replaced or closed but until that point they are still maintainable, Rhodes said. There is no room for testing the limit, he said with great emphasis. They limit posted is what the structure will handle.
He said this is why engineers around the country are saying there is a financial cliff coming. Eventually, inflation on materials will far outpace the funding Ohio county engineers have and they will no longer be able to keep up with all of the work, Reinhart said.
Auglaize County is unique compared to Allen and Putnam Counties because they have the facilities and equipment necessary to create their own concrete and beams, up to 33 foot wide, in Wapakoneta. Reinhart said his crews spend their winters either plowing snow or making the parts for bridges that need to be repaired when spring and summer arrive.
“It’s not uncommon for us to have the components for 5-6 bridges a year on hand,” he said.
The Auglaize County Engineer’s Office can repair 65 percent of county bridges without contracting out for the parts, Reinhart said. The office does not contract out that service to neighboring counties, however. If an engineer from a neighboring county is interested in setting up a facility like theirs, Reinhart said he’s happy to give them a tour and help them learn how to do it.
“If there ever comes a time when we have the funding and all of my county’s bridges are fine, I might start thinking about doing that,” he said.
The funding solution
Reinhart said the solution to county funding is a simple one, and one that the states surrounding Ohio have implemented — an increase to the state fuel tax. If the state fuel tax were to be increased by three cents gradually over three years it would balance out the gap between county revenue and inflation, he said.
A one-cent increase in the state gas tax for a single year would generate $60 million. Divided among the 88 Ohio counties, would give each county almost $682,000 in revenue, Rhodes said. Increase that to two cents the next year and that would give each county almost $1.3 million in revenue. If the tax were increased to three cents and remained there, each county would have a revenue of around $2 million to spend on bridge and road maintenance, repair and replacement, Rhodes said.
“Ohioans wouldn’t even notice because gas prices are always fluctuating anyway,” he said.
Reinhart said county engineers have met with the state legislature many times to explain how dire the infrastructure situation is in Ohio counties and how raising the state gas tax would help alleviate that problem, but they still don’t show any movement in implementing it.
Bruning said it isn’t his place to tell state representatives what they should or shouldn’t do, but ODOT wouldn’t turn down more money to work on infrastructure.
The outlook
“We need funding on every level — local, state and federal,” said Rhodes.
Right now it’s like having a home with a roof that needs to be replaced, he said. You can spend the money to fix the roof or buy a $20 tarp to strap to the roof. You buy the tarp, strap it to the roof and it keeps the rain out for awhile, but eventually the rain is going to get through the tarp and seep into the roof and then into the walls of the home. Now a $1,000 roof job has turned into having to rebuild a $100,000 home, all because you didn’t want to spend the money when the roof started leaking, Rhodes said.
“Due to our declining revenue and increasing costs, we’ve gone from maintenance mode to a more preservation mode until more funding is available,” he said. “Therefore, we’ve been relying on federal, state and Ohio Public Works Commission funds to replace our aging bridges. Everyone else is doing that, too, so competition has become tough for those funds.”
Reach Bryan Reynolds at 567-242-0362.
