Financing Low-Volume Road Improvements

Abstract

Over the past 30 years the population of Washington County, Oregon, has doubled to more than 530,000 residents. With growth limited to the urban area, resources for urban roads mostly kept pace with population growth, but little funding was available for maintenance and improvement of rural local roads. The county has about 250 mi of rural gravel roads in its 1,279-mi inventory. A $50 million investment to pave them all would be challenging to fund and difficult to justify. Creative approaches were needed to fund road improvements. Washington County's Board of Commissioners adopted and backed road maintenance policies, and county voters supported funding initiatives that made possible a variety of creative financing methods to fund low-volume road improvements. This paper discusses how more than 80 low-volume roads that were once gravel were upgraded to a hard surface using financing methods that may be available to other local jurisdictions.