Ohio’s transportation bill benefits Butler County roads

The new law provides the following limit increases:

There is also a provision for a 5% limit increase — or the amount of the state transportation department’s construction cost index — beginning next year.

Butler County Engineer Greg Wilkens told the Journal-News “it’s substantial enough to help us out and it’s indexed to inflation which is critical.”

The so-called “force account” limits — meaning the use their own forces to do the work — haven’t been increased since 2003. Wilkens said there are a number of benefits to the increased limits, not the least of which is the current inflation crisis.

“Imagine what we can do now with the dollars that were set in 2003. The material costs are so much more than the limits we can do,” Wilkens said, and added he can’t even buy the materials needed for some of these smaller jobs and if costs have gone up “20% in the last four years you can imagine what it is since ‘03.”

Old limits were problematic

Prior to this change, Wilkens had to go through the bidding process for projects that were estimated over the force account limits, which means more time and money.

“It’s a longer time consuming process with more complex planning and more complex engineering that we’ve got to do,” Wilkens said. “So there’s more cost involved in taking to a contract.”

Wilkens’ preliminary force account project budget is $619,500 for 13 projects. The cost range for these culvert repair and replacements is $12,500 and $37,500.

Another issue has been that contractors won’t bid on these smaller projects. Hamilton’s Director of Engineering Rich Engle said he could sympathize with that problem.

“There are very few contractors and you need to obviously get them interested in bidding on project and they’re not going to bid a smaller project,” Engle said.

Wilkens also said his office is staffed at the levels they need to plow snow in the winter, so “we can utilize our forces in the summertime better” by being able to do more force account work.

Wilkens said while his construction schedule is basically set for the year the change can still have an impact.

“We’ve always got something in need of repair and we will analyze it to see if we can do it with our own forces or contract it out,” Wilkens said. “It opens up the opportunity to look at a few bigger jobs we just couldn’t even look at.”

What broke the legislative logjam?

State Sen. George Lang was a co-sponsor of the bill; the Republican from West Chester Twp. said he has been advocating for this since five years ago.

“I’ve been fighting to get those force accounts increased ever since I’ve been up there and this is the first year we’ve been successful,” Lang said. “There’s been a lot of opposition to it, mostly from unions who think this will hurt them and then there are legislators who put their relationships with the unions ahead of their relationship to the taxpayers. I will always put the taxpayers first.”

He said the legislative logjam likely broke when he and other legislators tried to remove limits altogether and let counties decide for themselves. That is something Wilkens strongly supported and Lang said the county commissioners here would lifted all restrictions.

“I think when people realized what we were going to do, they were more than happy to negotiate with us and give us a much better deal than they wanted to,” Lang said.

Wilkens manages all major roadwork for the 13 townships in the county — the townships pay for the work — but some, such as West Chester Twp., also do infrastructure work on their own. Public Works Director Arun Hindupur said while raising the limits are a good thing “I think we’ve been able to be successful under the old regime.”

He said at least they now have the option to look at doing more in-house work, if it makes fiscal sense.

“It certainly could be more efficient if we have the capability of doing more in-house,” Hindupur said. “At the same time we want to make sure we are efficient in spending, in terms of well, do we need to buy new equipment to do that work, and do we need to have more labor hours allocated to it. So it’s that balance that we’re trying to strike, to make sure it’s the most efficient and quality work.”

The new threshold amounts have the biggest impact on Wilkens’ office because he has such a huge operation. All seven cities in Butler County are chartered, so the force account rules don’t apply to them.

Cities have different rules

Fairfield Public Works Director Ben Mann said they are bound by Ohio Revised Code laws that require a competitive bid process for projects estimated to exceed $50,000. But there aren’t rules for how much work his own staff performs.

Generally he said projects costing more than $25,000 he’ll contract out, and if the estimate falls below the state bid threshold, he’ll get three estimates.

“Anything more than $25,000 likely we are not doing in-house, if it would be more than $50,000 it’s very unlikely we’d be doing something like that in-house,” Mann said. “We just wouldn’t tie up our manpower to do something like that.”

Engle said their major paving and roadwork projects are typically $2 million-plus, and they bid those, but smaller jobs city crews perform.

“We do a lot of force account work internal on our city, that we do with our own forces... only if we deem internally that this project is of sufficient magnitude and complexity we would typically go out to bid,” Engle said adding “because Hamilton’s a charter city we don’t necessarily have to follow all of the requirements of the Revised Code.”