MANSFIELD — The second leg of Richland County road improvements was approved on Tuesday by county commissioners.
The three-member board voted unanimously on the request from county Engineer Adam Gove to resurface about 10.2 miles using the cold constructed asphalt pavement process, awarding a $737,149 contract to Earthworm Construction from Iberia.
The vote comes a week after commissioners approved an $851,270 contract with Sarver Paving of Ashland to chip-and-seal nearly 30 miles of county roads.
Sarver submitted the only other bid for the CCAP work, though it came in at $766,291, Gove said.
CCAP is a blend of gelled asphalt and additives mixed with pre-approved aggregate through a mobile mixing plant. The ability to blend different aggregate during the mixing process creates a mix for application in various thicknesses.
Work will be done on sections of Brenneman Road, Noble Road, Opdyke Road and Wheatcraft Road, according to Gove.
Agencies using this material find that pavement costs can be reduced as much as 30 percent using CCAP versus hot mix asphalt.
“Part of the benefit of CCAP is we can cover up some stuff that’s not so good. If we were going to do the same mile of road (with hot-mix asphalt), we may have to go out and do repairs first, which pushes our price up,” the engineer said.
“CCAP is good at covering up bad roads that are beyond what we would consider for a maintenance treatment with a chip-and-seal road,” Gove said of the process, which applies a new surface about one-and-a half-inches thick.
“It won’t show the imperfections of the existing roadway. It kind of covers up a lot of the cracking and some potholes that would need to go out and do repairs and stabilization before we would put a hot-mix asphalt on those,” Gove said.
The engineer said his office performs a “paving condition rating” process before deciding which roads it will improve and which treatment will be used.
“It’s a complicated process. It takes several iterations, but that’s how we go about it,” he said.
The CCAP work will be done in August or September, according to Gove, who said his office began using the process three or four years ago.
“We started looking into some options, things we could do, to get more road work done for the same amount of money that we’ve been receiving for the last several years,” he said.
The engineer said he has begun seeking bids for hot-mix asphalt work this summer, planning to do just under five miles of repaving — the third leg of the 2024 road-repair projects.
The cost of that work is anticipated to be more than $700,000, according to the engineer.
State reimbursement for court-appointed counsel may be reduced
Commissioner Tony Vero said commissioners recently received a memo from the Ohio Public Defender’s Office that a reduction in state reimbursement for court-appointed defense attorney work may be coming.
Vero said the state had been reimbursing the county for about 85 percent of the cost for criminal defense work done on behalf of indigent defendants. He said the memo projects reimbursement between July 1 and June 30, 2025, will likely be around 78 percent.
“Which is yet another reduction,” the commissioner said.
In her memo, State Public Defender Elizabeth Miller wrote:
“Unfortunately, the current structure of Ohio’s indigent defense system does not provide OPD with the ability to give a guaranteed reimbursement rate. Ohio law provides all 88 counties with the authority to make all spending decisions and requires each county to pay for their indigent defense costs up front, followed by submitting those costs to OPD for reimbursement.
“County spending takes place and then once all the bills from all 88 counties are submitted to the OPD (approximately three months later) a comparison is made between the amount spent and the amount available to provide reimbursement – this alone determines the reimbursement rate.”
In the memo, Miller said the state appropriated approximately $366 million in the biennial state budget to reimburse counties for their indigent defense costs in Fiscal Year 2024 and 2025 (FY24 and FY25).
“Based on the county reimbursement request levels from the past five fiscal years, paying particular attention to FY24, the OPD is setting the initial reimbursement rate for FY25 at 78 percent,” Miller wrote.
Richland County currently pays local court-appointed attorneys $75 per hour when representing clients charged with 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree felonies. It pays $70 for 4th and 5th degree felony defendants, as well as those charged with misdemeanors in Mansfield Municipal Court.
Vero said the county budgeted $120,000 in its 2024 general fund budget for the work.
“I would anticipate having to put in more for 2025,” he said. “That’s something to think about in the mid-year budget review.”
