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From Cook County, MN - September 27, 2024

By: Cook County Highway Engineer Robert Kimmel-Hass

Over the last several weeks, the highway department has been putting together its proposed 2025 budget.

There are a lot of pieces that go into the budgeting process like maintaining our equipment fleet, tracking culvert and gravel costs, ensuring projects are funded, and planning for the future. This year, the highway department’s preliminary levy came in at $2,935,267 which is a 5% increase over our 2024 levy. The board of commissioners has made it a priority to reduce the county’s preliminary levy from 9.81% down to around 5%, meaning the highway department, among others, will have to sharpen our pencils when it comes to resubmitting our budgets. Setting budgets doesn’t get you a ‘Whole Lotta Love’, but we are going to ‘Ramble On’ and go over what the thought process is while we sharpen our pencils.

Maintaining our equipment fleet is vital to our department's operation. Most of our equipment is used year-round, so we need to ensure that we can rely on it at any time.

In 2021, we refined our equipment replacement schedule to better reflect life expectancies for our equipment and to try and keep costs down. While our tandem axle trucks aren’t lined with ‘Kashmir’ on their seats, they still cost approximately $330,000. Looking at our entire fleet, we manage approximately $9,000,000 worth of equipment. Refining our replacement schedules involved analyzing our maintenance costs on each piece of equipment over its lifetime, consulting with other counties who use the same makes and models as to what they are experiencing (and seeing if other brands perform better), talking amongst our Highway Advisory Committee and leveraging the experience there, and talking with our shop and maintenance staff to leverage additional experience in using the equipment.

What resulted was the following: tandem axle trucks are scheduled every 14 years; graders are 12 years; pickups, including our one tons, are 20 years; and all of our heavy equipment (brushers, loaders, backhoes, excavators, and skid-steers) is 30 years. People often ask why we can’t extend the life more on our tandem axles, for example, and the simplest answer is that we use them every day of the year. As I mentioned before, we use them to plow and we use them to haul gravel, so there’s really no break in their use. We have to strike a balance between reliability and financial responsibility and that is why those replacement schedules were chosen. What resulted was a smoothing out of our equipment expenses, instead of peaks and valleys of spending. For 2025 we are allocating about $560,000 towards our equipment.

Tracking culvert, gravel, calcium chloride, salt, sand, and other miscellaneous materials adds up to another portion of our budget. Calcium chloride is always a topic for discussion, and this year we actually reduced the amount we applied throughout the county due to cost constraints. From 2009 – 2019 the price per gallon of calcium chloride held pretty steady at an average of $0.92. Since 2020 the price has increased each year, and this year was $1.53/gallon. Those are expenses we just cannot keep up with and that is why less of it got put down this year. Culverts are another expense that continues to rise. We use corrugated metal pipes, which don’t need as much fill placed on top as their plastic counterparts and are far less susceptible to bending. We have not increased our culvert budget in over 10 years, so this year one of our goals is to moderately increase it to ensure we are replacing deficient culverts and have the necessary materials to do so.

Planning for the future is also important. How important is it to have a savings account and to allocate to it early and often so that “future you” won’t incur a huge expense? This part of the budgeting process is more difficult and is typically one of the first areas to get cut in a budget because we need to focus on what’s in front of us instead of 5-10 years down the road. We have proposed adding an additional maintenance worker and truck for the last three years by allocating little bits each year to savings. Unfortunately, when budget cuts happen, that has been one of the first items to go. This year, we are still proposing this savings line, but we will have to see where the numbers fit for our current needs and what we can allocate towards the future.

While this has just been a snapshot into our budgeting process, I hope it hasn’t left you ‘Dazed and Confused’. We will continue the budgeting process until a final levy is set in December. Let’s Rock and Roll!

As always, if you have any questions feel free to give me a call at 218-387-3014 or email me at [email protected].

See you on the road,

Robbie

County Connections is a column on timely topics and service information from your Cook County government. Cook County – Supporting Community.