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Show Highway Maintenance Levels Threatened By Cost Incr ease For years, the big challenges In Utah's highway program have centered on new construction. Construction on the interstate system, urban highways, and access roads to recreation areas have had the spotlight. But things have happened this year that have changed the entire emphasis of Utah's highway program. Inflation has sent highway construction costs up a whopping 58-per cent over the previous year. At the same time, the energy crisis has inspired Utah motorists to reduce their gasoline consumption, which has resulted In a 2.8 percent reduction in highway user revenue. This year, Utah highway officials are not so concerned about constructing new highways as they are about just maintaining the ones the state already has. Providing maintenance will be no easy task, because the state's highway maintenance program is also feeling the affects of a devastating rate of inflation that has exceeded all expectations. In just the past year, asphalt for patching pot holes has gone up from $27 to about $100 a ton, striping paint has doubled in price, and equipment costs have gone up 55 percent. Highway officials are being faced not only with a need for increased maintenance revenue for next fiscal year, but also a need for a supplemental appropriation to continue maintenance operations at their current level this year. The latter is posing some real problems because the Highway Department has no source from which funds can be appropriated. Maintenance comprises the biggest portion of the department's S3 million dollar budget proposed for fiscal 1976. The proposed budget calls for almost 21 million dollars for maintenance, about seven and a half million more than the Department was appropriated this fiscal year, or about a 60 percent Increase. Jim West, the Utah Highway Department's engineer for maintenance, says, "the sad thing about the proposed increase is that it won't enable the Department to provide any more maintenance than it is now providing." He said the department will only be able to continue the same level of maintenance on the state's highways that has been provided for the past five years. The biggest increase in the proposed maintenance budget for fiscal 1976 is for "hard surface activities," which consists mostly of pot hole patching and other repairs to paved highways. The Department is requesting more than double the appropriation for hard surface activities this fiscal year, principally because the price of patching asphalt has increased so dramatically. Traffic services such as signing, lighting and lane painting call for the second largest increase in the proposed maintenance budget. The amount requested is 91 percent more than the Department received for traffic services for fiscal 1975, primarily because traffic paint has doubled in price. Because of increased materials, labor, and equipment costs, Highway Department officails have requested 36 percent more next fiscal year for repairs to bridges and drainage facilities, 40 percent more for weed control and landscape upkeep, 62 percent more for gravel road maintenance, and 36 perfent more for litter pickup and rest stop cleaning. Only a seven percent Increase Is requested for snow and Ice removal next fiscal year. Knowing, from long experience, that it's cheaper to keep a road maintained than it Is to rebuild It, Utah Highway Department officals are hoping that no curtailment in the current level of maintenance will be necessary. However, they point out that the Department has to operate solely from the highway user revenue it receives. With 407 lane miles of highway added to the State Highway System since last year, and with the cost of maintaining a lane mile projected to increase 37 percent next fiscal year, maintenance officals say the department can't continue the current level of maintenance without In creased revenue. |