In multiple instances during the summer, residents of subdivisions in White River Township came to county meetings wanting answers.
The roads in their neighborhoods were crumbling and they wanted to know why they hadn’t been fixed.
The Johnson County Highway Department presented some of their plans to fix those roads at the commissioner meetings the residents attended.
Determining what roads in the county to repair or replace each year takes months of planning annually and is based off of a system that rates the conditions of the hundreds of miles of roads throughout the county, said Luke Mastin, Johnson County Highway Department director.
The county highway department is in charge of the roads in dozens of subdivisions across the county, with most in White River Township. The department is also charged with up keep on hundreds of miles of the county’s existing roads and plans and executes future road projects.
Each year, the highway department uses the PASER scale to decide how to handle upkeep on the roads, Mastin said.
The PASER scale was developed by a university and is widely used across the country. Other communities in the county use the same system.
The PASER system guides road officials into rating roads based on their wear and tear and deciding what to do about each of the roads based on their score.
Each year, highway department employees do an inventory of the roads in the county, including mapping out the road work that is needed in subdivisions in the county using the scale, Mastin said.
Mastin and other highway department employees will zero in on which roads need the most work and decide which ones need repaired. They then try to fit as much work as possible into the annual road work plan, which has limited funding, he said.
