Dalton, Whitfield to contract road work

By Charles Oliver
Dalton Daily Citizen

May 03, 2008 10:06 pm

— On Monday, both the Dalton City Council and the Whitfield County Board of Commissioners could give their approval to a plan calling for the county to maintain all roads, streets and bridges in the county. That plan also calls for almost all work on the roads and bridges to be bid out to private contractors. The resolution anticipates the county will maintain only a road crew large enough to handle emergency repairs and projects too small to bid out.
“It’s kind of a letter of intent. It says this is what we intend, what we would like to achieve, but we know there is still some work to be done,” said Board of Commissioners chairman Brian Anderson.
The resolution calls for the two sides to reach a final “city-county transportation agreement” by July 1.
“This will encompass everything to do with streets, roads, sidewalks, striping, marking, everything,” said Dalton Mayor David Pennington.
The resolution also calls for a third party to review the transportation departments and recommend how they should be restructured in light of the planned changes.
“From the city side, we are going out of the road business, so obviously we will not need those employees after that,” Pennington said.
Dalton public works will remain responsible for garbage and recycling collection, traffic signals and landscaping.
City officials estimate that initially 25 to 30 positions could be cut. The public works department currently has 91 employees.
City administrator Butch Sanders says it is too early to say what will happen to those employees.
In some cases when city’s contract out services, they ask private contractors to try to hire former employees.
“There may be opportunities for employment in the private sector for a great number if not all of those employees,” he said.
Sanders said some may be offered jobs in other areas.
“We are just beginning our budget process. We will be looking at ways we can provide service in a more efficient manner in every department,” Sanders said. “We’ll be talking about that. We may have a need elsewhere. But it is way too early in the game to give you a definitive answer.”
Anderson said he did not know how many county workers might be affected by the plan.
Pennington says he expects the agreement could save city and county taxpayers millions of dollars each year.
“Any time you combine departments you become more efficient, and when you’ve been spending as the city and the county in the past, anywhere from $10 million to $16 million (a year), you can expect significant savings,” Pennington said.
The agreement also calls for all unneeded equipment to be sold, with the proceeds going to whichever government owns it.
“Besides the efficiencies created, it also gets us much closer to all the different entities in this community getting on the same page with a plan going forward,” Pennington said. “That’s a real issue in this community. We’ve all got to get on the same page so we can move to the next level.”
City and county officials say this agreement will replace the current Local Option Sales Tax (LOST) agreement. Under that agreement, the county has promised to perform a certain amount of work for the city each year if requested.
“The DOT (Georgia Department of Transportation) has contracted their work out for a large number of years to private contractors. If it works for the state, it can work for city and county governments. A lot of city and county governments don’t have these road departments anyway,” Pennington said.
Council member Dick Lowrey says both governments have been using private contractors for an increasing amount of work in recent years. He noted that all work on the Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax (SPLOST) that voters approved last year will be done by private firms. That SPLOST will fund various road and transportation projects across the county.
“We’ve worked, I think, with all of these (contractors) before,” he said.
City and county officials say several issues will have to be worked out before they can sign a final agreement. Those include how the transportation work will be funded, the size of the new department and how transportation projects will be scored. The resolution calls for streets and roads to be graded on a numerical score, just as the Department of Transportation does, and for priorities to be based on those scores, with those most in need of work getting higher priority.