Local voters on Nov. 7 will decide the fate of a proposed 1% sales tax to pay for road improvements and new bridges in Milledgeville and Baldwin County.
If passed, the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or T-SPLOST, would be in effect from 2024 through 2029 and collect as much as $45 million. The split would be 65% to the county while the remaining 35% would go to the city, paying for road projects both within the city limits and the unincorporated county area.
Baldwin County Manager Carlos Tobar and Commissioner Henry R. Craig were the guest speakers at the Rotary Club of Milledgeville’s meeting Thursday. Together they educated the civic group on how the county would benefit from the added T-SPLOST dollars.
Tobar began by explaining county commissioners only have about 10% of discretionary spending at their disposal. The rest goes toward constitutional requirements like law enforcement, the court system, water and sewer services, and elections administration. With 433 road miles within the unincorporated county limits, there’s a lot of maintenance needed and little funding left with which to do it.
“The current rate of resurfacing in Baldwin County is about five miles per year,” Tobar said.
Recent inflation has made it tougher. The county manager said five years ago that it would have taken 62 years for all county roads to get resurfaced, but that number has now risen to 84 years as the price tag for one mile of asphalt is currently $200,000.
The county administrator went on to say that T-SPLOST would increase the county’s ability to resurface roads a great deal. Instead of just five miles per year, the county could repave an additional 25 miles annually.
A public criticism of the special transportation tax in the past was voters did not know what roads…
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