<p>Their roads are crumbling and they want help.</p>
<p>Residents of the Willow Lakes subdivision in the Center Grove area have seen the roads in their subdivision off Stones Crossing Road grow progressively worse during the past few years.</p>
<p>Homeowners pull pieces of broken concrete that have been flipped up into their yards out of their lawn mower tires, watch children try to avoid the craters in the road when they ride their bikes. And residents suspect their property values are going down because of their pocked concrete roads.</p>
<p>The president of the neighborhood’s homeowner’s association purchased his home about four years ago and immediately noticed and heard about the road conditions.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
<p>"This was an issue the day I moved in," Nathan Byers said.</p>
<p>Residents of the subdivision have had concerns about the conditions of their roads for at least the last 15 years and the topic is always discussed at the annual homeowner’s association meeting, residents said. </p>
<p>Through the years, residents would call the highway department and share when a portion of the neighborhood roads needed particular attention. The next day, in some instances, the county would do patch work on the concrete that would not last long and looked to be of poor quality, neighborhood resident Dan Cecil said.</p>
<p>"The repairs they do are results of calls we made," he said.</p>
<p>Soon those fixes were crumbling, residents said.</p>
<p>This year, the homeowner’s association decided to make getting help for their roads their No.1 priority. </p>
<p>Residents gathered up pieces of concrete that had chipped off their roads and showed them to the county commissioners and Johnson County Highway Department employees at a commissioners meeting in June. They also met with the county’s highway department and a county commissioner and arranged a call-in campaign to the highway department to talk about the conditions of the roads.</p>
<p>Those meetings and other actions have gotten some traction toward getting their roads fixed and replaced. Some work on the roads in Willow Lakes is planned.</p>
<p>The fix is part of a long-term plan to begin replacing concrete roads with asphalt in subdivisions across White River Township.</p>
<p>But until that happens, the county will begin replacing crumbling slabs of concrete with new concrete, said Luke Mastin, Johnson County Highway Department director.</p>
<p>The highway department is in charge of road upkeep in the subdivision. The county’s highway department also oversees the roads of dozens of subdivisions across the county that aren’t part of a city or town, mainly in White River Township, and hundreds of other miles of roads across the county.</p>
<p>When the highway department patches roads that are made of concrete, the only viable, quick option is to use asphalt patching. The ideal fix is to replace the entire slab of concrete or to convert the road to asphalt, Mastin said.</p>
<p>The asphalt patching does not match the color of the roads in the subdivision, and in some photos of patches provided by residents, the patching is placed on the road in mounds and is not level with the street.</p>
<p>Part of the issue is that in a lot of subdivisions built around the same time as Willow Lakes, concrete roads were built, and those subdivision roads are deteriorating too, Mastin said.</p>
<p>Developers at the time likely used concrete slabs for roads because of the cost of the materials, he said.</p>
<p>“It really was a cost point based on materials on construction at that time," Mastin said.</p>
<p>Now all of those subdivisions have deteriorating roads as the concrete roads are nearing the end of their useful life, he said.</p>
<p>“Unfortunately, they will all approach their end of life at the same time," Mastin said.</p>
<p>The highway department has plans to replace some slabs in Willow Lakes and in other subdivisions later this year, with the long-term plan to replace neighborhood roads in those areas with asphalt, Mastin said.</p>
<p>Asphalt is easier and cheaper to repair, he said.</p>
<p>For example, based on bid prices, it will cost the county about 70 percent more to reconstruct spot locations with concrete instead of asphalt, Mastin said.</p>
<p>Converting to asphalt instead of replacing concrete across subdivisions takes a lot of money and work. Funding is the issue.</p>
<p>For now, residents are coping with the roads in their current condition.</p>
<p>Willow Lakes was built in the mid-1980s. Home prices in the Center Grove area neighborhood for homes currently for sale are in the low- to mid-$300,000.</p>
<p>Byers has steadily watched more families with children move into the subdivision during the last few years. Homes were being bought and sold at a rate of 5 to 6 percent a year.</p>
<p>Residents understand what the highway department faces in repairing and fixing the roads. Residents are still concerned that the repairs were not budgeted for throughout the years and that there is still not a fixed timeline on getting all of the subdivision’s roads fixed, Byers said.</p>
<p>"Will it be another year before they get back or another five years," he said.</p>
<p>The timeline of when the complete asphalt change over will be made has not been set, and the plan to pay for the work has not been determined either, Mastin said.</p>
<p>The highway department is working on a detailed assessment of specific repairs needed in all neighborhoods with concrete streets,which would include an inventory of which ones need replaced and the cost. The assessment could be done by this fall, Mastin said.</p>
