No easy fixes for county roads

DIAMOND LAKE — In the first of three town hall meetings held by the Pend Oreille County Roads Department, one thing was clear: There isn’t a way to finance needed county road repairs that will be popular.

Nevertheless, some of the people present at the meeting Monday night, June 30, at the Diamond Lake fire hall said they would be willing to pay to keep the roads from returning to gravel, which is one of the things that is currently taking place.

“We wouldn’t have moved here if it was all gravel roads,” one woman who lives on Wilms Road in the south county said. “If we don’t have roads, this is not a livable community. We would leave.”

She said she and her partner moved here in 2018 because the home they bought was on a paved road and for the fiber optic internet.

Pend Oreille County Public Works Director Craig Jackson acknowledged some of the county’s roads were in tough shape, but there simply wasn’t the money to repair them. He said the Road Department had come up with three ways to raise money.

Jackson has written about the road problem in detail in an eightpart series of ads published in The Miner. His articles can be read online at www.pendoreille.gov/public- works/page/your-roads-yourvoice. The articles culminate in the three ways to raise more money.

Jackson said the county has about as many private roads as county roads.

A levy lid lift, a sales tax increase and establishing a vehicle tab fee would each raise about $600,000 annually, he told the group of about a half dozen members of the public who attended the Monday night meeting.

Jackson said the road department is getting about half of the road levy tax that is allowed by law. Pend Oreille County currently collects $1.09 per $1,000 assessed property value, far below the state-allowed cap of $2.25 per $1,000 assessed value. A road levy lift could increase that. Adding another 23 cents per $1,000 assessed value would generate about $600,000 annually.

A sales tax increase of about 20 cents per $100, 0.02%, would also generate about $600,000 a year.

A vehicle tab fee of $40 a year would also get to $600,000 annually.

Former county commissioner Karen Skoog attended the meeting. She said the county needed to use all three options, and that the county needed to show it was doing all it could to raise money locally before the state would provide more money.

“If you use your local tools, it does give you a little bit more, I’d like to think leverage with the state,” Skoog said. “They’ll say, ‘Did you use all your local tools? Don’t come to us for money until you’ve done all your local tools.’” She said there is a rural-urban divide between lawmakers in Olympia and Pend Oreille County.

Pend Oreille County commissioner John Gentle, who represents District 3, said the county shouldn’t have paved some of the roads it did.

“Some of the things had no business being paved under the county watch anyhow,” he said. “We didn’t have to sign on to subdivisions, especially if they weren’t built to our standards.”

Some at the meeting said they were in favor of paying more for roads, including

“I would pay all three,” he said. But he pointed out that there were some who moved to the county because it was a low-tax county.