Hall County needs more gravel to finish road repairs

Between the flood, heavy rains and bad winter, the Hall County Roads Department is using more gravel than usual and will need more to get it all done.

They're using 15 percent more gravel this year than in 2018. That's close to 37,000 tons of gravel. But it won't be enough to get them through this upcoming winter.

"We had a real winter last winter, and it ended with a bang and a flood. Since then it's been a lot of rain," said Steve Riehle, Hall County engineer. "Looks like we're going to be short, because we're going to tap into next year's gravel, which we typically put down in Spring of 2020. We'll be tapping into that in Fall 2019."

Crews have been hard at work making road repairs, weather permitting. On Monday, they hauled gravel from a 7,000 ton stockpile in Cairo throughout the county.

This week, they'll lay gravel along Airport Road just west of Hwy 11. It's just one stretch of about 340 miles of gravel road in Hall County the roads department designated as a high priority "A" area. Crews are about half way done at this point.

The gravel budget started out at more than $380,000 at the start of this fiscal year. After the flood, the Hall County board added close to $23,000 to the budget to fix areas there.

Riehle said that'll give them enough to fix the high priority "A" areas, but not to finish their "B" or "C" roads.

"This year is not an average year, and so we need to increase that. We've increased it by almost $23,000 working with the board. We anticipate that increase is going to be almost three times that $23,000, or pushing $75,000 or $80,000 increase in gravel that we'll need to get roads ready for winter 2020," Riehle said.

He said that's about a 25 percent increase in their current gravel supply.

Riehle will bring the budget issue to the Hall County Board of Supervisors at their meeting Tuesday. If they do expand the budget, that could be cuts to other road projects and resurfacing.