Sherburne County has revised its cost participation policy with cities and townships for construction projects.
Tuesday, Sherburne County Public Works Director Andrew Witter presented the county commissioners with an updated policy that sets participation costs for any projects related to county roads.
“We’ve been before you a number of times before in workshops discussing this item,” he said. “We started noticing some items were outdated and we included items that weren’t addressed during the last construction policy, like roundabouts and intersections.”
Witter said almost all of the policy deals with urban areas.
“Any rural two-lane road reconstructions will not have any cost participation from townships and smaller cities,” he said.
One item on the list was the replacement of bituminous bike trails along county roads. Even though the existing trail may have been requested by the city, the county will cover 100% of the replacement cost if it needs to be relocated as part of a county road reconstruction project. It is the same (100%) if the county has to replace existing sidewalks as part of a project
Witter said he spoke with city officials about signalled intersections and roundabouts on county road projects. He said cities were requesting that signal cost participation be pro-rated based on the number of legs each entity had entering the intersection.
“I left it the way it has been in the past, a straight 50-50 split. It doesn’t matter how many legs there are,” he said. “Signals are generally a response to land development, to urbanizing development, to an increase in traffic volumes, so we wanted to make sure there was some participation at the city level.”
He also said right-of-way acquisition was previously listed as zero county cost participation. But he changed it.
“As far back as I’m aware, we’ve been paying costs for right of way,” he said. “So we updated that.”
Witter said he wanted to make sure there weren’t any major cost shifts to cities or townships in the updated policy.
“In order to be consistant and fair we looked at surrounding counties and what their typical cost participation policy was,” he said. “Sherburne County’s is very favorable to cities and townships. Overall they pay a much lower percentage of our construction costs.”
Staff Position
The board also approved a request by Witter to fill a highway maintenance/ equipment operator position.
Witter said a current employee has been on medical leave since last December, with his return date unknown.
With winter approaching, the highway department needs to have enough personnel to deal with the upcoming snow season.
