Palm Beach County budget proposal cuts road work - Sun-Sentinel
Palm Beach County drivers may face more potholes and other hazards due to a host of budget cuts to road projects proposed Thursday to lessen a planned property-tax rate increase.
The County Commission on Sept. 13 called for cutting road programs and tapping reserves to limit the size of a tax-rate boost, while also restoring previously planned cuts to popular programs that reached from parks to the sheriff's office.
On Thursday, County Administrator Robert Weisman proposed almost $8 million in spending cuts, most from planned road maintenance.
That would include $1.2 million for work on the Camino Real bridge near Boca Raton and planned improvements to other Intracoastal Waterway crossings, Glades community roads and traffic signals and intersections.
Road resurfacing has taken big budget hits in recent years and that continues under the new budget plan.
The county has more than 3,300 miles of road to maintain and should be resurfacing 169 miles a year to deal with cracks, potholes and rippling, according to County Engineer George Webb.
That costs almost $13 million a year, Webb said, but cutbacks in recent years reduced resurfacing spending to $2 million a year. For the budget that begins Oct. 1, the county now plans to set aside $500,000 for "spot emergency patching," Webb said.
"It takes a lot of money out of the road program," Weisman said of the proposed cuts. "Eventually it's going to mean road quality is going to deteriorate."
The County Commission Tuesday night will consider the proposed roadwork cuts when it takes its final vote on the $4 billion budget and property-tax rate.
The new proposal calls for raising the operating-budget property-tax rates a little less than 1 percent, to about $4.78 per $1,000 of taxable value.
The need for cutting road projects was due to commissioners trying to rein in the proposed property tax- rate increase — the third in three years — as well as their unwillingness to cut programs that prompted public backlash.
The County Commission also was unwilling to cut $5 million from Sheriff Ric Bradshaw's budget, after Bradshaw maintained that he couldn't shrink his more than $400 million budget.
On Wednesday, the sheriff sent commissioners a letter saying he has cut about $20 million during the past two years.
Bradshaw said there was "great concern" that if he made additional budget cuts, that money could end up in county reserves or used to restore cuts from commission-controlled departments.
Instead of more cuts, Bradshaw offered to return $1 million more in "excess fees" collected by the Sheriff's Office if the commission agrees to use the money "dollar for dollar" to reduce the tax rate.
Unspent excess fees collected by the Sheriff's Office and other branches of county government are already supposed to be returned to county coffers.
abreid@tribune.com, 561-228-5504
23 Sep, 2011--
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