Consultants urge Hart County to adopt multi-year road-rating plan to prioritize scarce paving funds

Aaron Wadley, a principal with LNCO Engineering (soon to be Terravia Engineering), and Chris Dills of Pavement Preservation Techniques told the Hart County Board of Commissioners that a formal road-rating plan would let the county prioritize which roads to preserve or resurface, program work over one- to five-year horizons, and make funding requests more defensible.

The consultants said a color-coded map tied to numeric ratings would show which roads need urgent full-depth work and which can be preserved with less expensive treatments, such as chip seals, microsurfacing or thin overlays. "If you can do a rating every 3 to 5 years, the money you spend on the rating will return in the value you get with the final product," Wadley said during the presentation.

Why it matters: commissioners face repeated requests from residents to pave specific roads while overall lane-mile burdens and funding limits mean the county cannot respond to every complaint. A road-rating system creates a transparent,…