Harvard considers new plan for road maintenance using gas tax revenue

The city of Harvard receives about $220,000 each year in state motor fuel tax revenues for road construction, City Administrator Lou Leone said.

For the past several years, those funds have gone to resurfacing city roads in poor shape. If the Harvard City Council agrees at its 7 p.m. Tuesday meeting, $120,000 of those dollars will instead be used to ensure roads built in the past five years are maintained properly, Leone said.

The remaining $100,000 will go towards stop-gap repairs on city streets.

“What we are going to do is seal coating. What that essentially is, is adding moisturizer to the road and filling in smaller cracks. It helps the road and keeps it from drying out,” said Leone, who began his new role as as the city administrator in December following Dave Nelson’s retirement.

When roads are rebuilt or ground down and repaved, the suggestion is to seal coat the road a year after construction and then every five years thereafter, Leone said. When maintenance is done correctly, new roads should last 20 to 40 years, with 20 years as the “bare minimum.”

“If you have done decent and good maintenance, that is now pushing a 30- to 40-year life span,” Leone said.

The remaining motor fuel tax funds will go toward patching roads until a more permanent solution is found.

Harvard has been using its motor fuel tax funding – paid by Illinois residents who purchase gasoline and redistributed in part to towns – to rebuild roads in favor of preventative maintenance, Leone said. But if the maintenance is not done, those roads will have a shortened life span.

Harvard knows it has a problem with its roads. The city placed referendums on past ballots, seeking a local sales tax increase to fund repairs. The council voted in September to place the same question on the April 4 ballot.

Voters turned down the question in the June 28 primary, with about 64% of residents voting no.

“The thing is we only have so much money” from the motor fuel tax funds, just the $220,000 from the state each year, Leone said.

Those funds have paid for resurfacing about a mile of city streets each year. With current inflation, the motor fuel tax funds will likely cover only 3/4 of a mile in resurfacing costs.

That doesn’t include if the city does any curb work, substructure, stormwater drains or even striping the roads with paint.

The city’s Transportation Committee was on board with the new focus on maintenance, but Leone said there was a heated debate. “We are changing our philosophies” about road maintenance.

The council is also expected to vote on the next phase of the Ayers Street streetscaping project. Paid for through a state and Metra grant, that project would improve sidewalks in the downtown leading to the high school.

“The question might be why the sidewalks and not roads? People use the sidewalks,” too, Leone said.

For him, the city is just trying to get Harvard roads “up to par,” he said. “With additional funding, we would be able to do the roads top to bottom and side to side.”