This meeting covered multiple segments: an infrastructure update and SPLOST presentation, a public Q&A session with county leadership, a ribbon cutting for Zona Light Park, a street naming ceremony, the launch of the DeCab Alert emergency notification system, a press conference appealing for help in a homicide investigation, and a youth soccer program announcement.
Through SPLOSS and an additional 19 to 20 miles through LMIG. LMIG are actual state funds. So I just want to say to you, we can't leapfrog you. Sometimes we get hostile calls from people that say my road is the worst. And I need you to come out here now. But we have a system. And if you live in particularly South and Unincorporated the CAB, because that is where the roads have the worst grades, you are actively seeing us resurface roads now. So if you give us the time, we are coming to your road and your street. But we have to be systemic in what we do because for years decisions were made for road surfacing by commissioners. There was no system in place. We're going to grade the roads. We're going to stick to the worst first philosophy. And given time, you will see that we will resurface all of the Cab County roads. Thank you. Thank you, Madam CEL. And in that note, if you look at the next slide, there's just the one thing that I wanted to highlight as the CEO mentioned, we started resurfacing in 2018. At that time, the average cost of resurfacing was 450,000 per mile. That has changed. Now the average cost of resurfacing is $900,000 a mile. In one of our recent contracts, it cost over a million dollars. So the cost of resurfacing is increasing. And actually asphalt is tied to the cost of gas and oil. So as that cost fluctuates, so does our resurfacing cost. Okay. The next thing is, you know, as we continue to, you know, what's next? As we continue to resurface roads, we do know that that PCI number will continue to get lower, and our can our rural conditions will continue to improve. And one note to finish talking about our resurfacing, our our pavement, the way we resurface roads, the way we evaluate them, our public works department is accredited by the national national agency, and when they reviewed how we resurface roads and how we go through the process of evaluation, they awarded the DeCap County Public Works Department with the model practice award. And what that means is that our evaluation process is used as a model practice for other public works departments around the country. Now we talk briefly about our stormwater utility. Everyone is familiar with that since we've had so much rain uh lately, everything's flooding. If you look at this slide, I'm sure you you look at that photograph, it's not fake. Uh that is a failed 72-inch corrugated metal pipe. It was real. And just a brief note about the infrastructure that we do maintain in the Cab County. Uh, we maintain over 500 miles of pipe. That's pipe along the right-of-way. We we maintain over um 22,000 catch basins. So when you do see a damaged catch base and uh alongside the road and it takes us a while to get to it, it's because we maintain over 22,000 of those. We also maintain over 900, actually 938 detention ponds, and we also have dams that we have to maintain, and a number of those dams are category one dams, which means that if they fail, there's a high potential of loss of property and life, and we maintain a number of those. We also maintain over 200 bridges in the county and over 135 miles of roadside ditches. So our inventory is huge, and our inventory uh is aging. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention that you know it takes a lot of uh funding to do this, the maintenance that we do, and it's so much inventory involved, but we do get around to um the projects sometimes not as quickly as you would like, but there is a large inventory that we are actually maintaining out there. But one of the other things that we are doing is green infrastructure efforts. You know, we're working with other partners, we're working with our parks department uh to um do different green infrastructure measures, and so that's to help the CAP County be more sustainable with our stormwater utility. Uh one of our recent uh we call it a success only because we were able to make a repair relatively quickly. You know, on the surface, it looks like there was just a a large hole in the road. Well, actually, that hole went all the way through to the uh the creek. And it took a lot of resources to to make this repair. So on the surface, it looks like what we're doing is small, but a project like this and the repair costs, it was actually over one million dollars. And because of all the work and the time and speed that we got it done, this project was submitted to our national organization, our Georgia chapter, for a um APW8 ABWA disaster of the year award.