Centre County commissioners to consider funding requests for 5 road safety projects

Halie Kines
·3 min read

Improving road safety in Centre County will be a topic on next week’s consent agenda for the Centre County commissioners as they vote on how the county will allocate its $164,427 in liquid fuel funds.

The county started its local transportation funding program in 2017 with a variety of funds (liquid fuels, fee for local use and Act 13) to improve transportation, Anne Messner, Centre County’s transportation planner, said during Tuesday’s meeting. The funds have been distributed throughout the county and have created “interesting flexibility” for municipalities to complete projects that otherwise wouldn’t be able to be done, she said.

The county only discussed liquid fuels on Tuesday, which can be used for construction, maintenance and repairing roads and bridges, and related expenditures. Liquid fuel funds the county receives is based on vehicle miles traveled and the gas that’s consumed, Messner said. Last year the county had $150,000 in liquid fuel funds. With more people driving this year, there are more funds, she said.

For its 2022 program, the county received 23 applications from 21 municipalities and all of the applications were eligible, Messner said. The total amount requested far exceeded what the county had to allocate, totaling near $941,000.

“That just speaks to the challenge of reviewing these projects and evaluating them and (how we) use these funds,” she said.

Five projects were recommended to the commissioners to fund, most of them in the full amount requested by the municipality.

“They all are safety projects. Each application indicated that they had some safety issue that they were trying to resolve and many of them are roadway deterioration so they need to put some significant work into these roadways to make them better and safer. We do have one that is actually an intersection improvement, which will make that intersection safer for the municipality,” Messner said.

The recommended projects are:

  • Howard Township applied for $55,000 to rehabilitate deteriorating roadway on Mount Eagle Road (T535). The total project cost is $80,620. The last time Howard Township received liquid fuel funds was in 2016.

  • Marion Township applied for $18,680 for improvement of the Slaughterhouse Road and Jacksonville Road intersection. The total project cost is $36,680. The last time they received liquid fuel funds was in 2014.

  • Patton Township applied for $48,300 to rehabilitate and install a new guardrail on Purdue Mountain Road (T344).The total project cost is $161,070. The last time they received liquid fuel funds was in 2013.

  • Spring Township applied for $24,000 to rehabilitate deteriorating roadway on Locust Street (T746). The total project cost is $39,068. The last time they received liquid fuel funds was in 2017.

  • Unionville Borough applied for $19,606 to rehabilitate deteriorating roadway on High Street. The total project cost is $21,785 and the last time Unionville Borough received liquid fuel funds was in 2019.

The commissioners approved putting the recommended projects on next week’s consent agenda, where they’ll take formal action to approve the funding requests. Commissioner Michael Pipe said this a first look at the projects and they’re accessing other ways to fund other projects in the future.