There are 674 miles of roads in unincorporated Walker County. But in the world of road maintenance, that’s 1,348 miles, since these roads hold traffic going in both directions. That’s 1,348 miles of roads to mow, 1,348 miles of trees to cut off the right of way, 1,348 miles of ditches to clean out, and 1,348 miles of roads to pave and stripe, among other maintenance needs.

“Paving is about $280,000 a mile, depending on the road and the condition of the road and what method we choose to pave it in those costs can get pretty high,” said Carlen Bowers, Road Superintendent.

Since 2018, Walker County has invested over $40-million to resurface over 217 miles of centerline roads thanks to a combination of funds like SPLOST, TSPLOST and LMIG from the state. The 2026 SPLOST would add an additional $8.5-million for road resurfacing. Combined with TSPLOST, the extra funds would mean more roads could be addressed sooner.

“Whenever I’m out looking at roads, preparing paving lists, and so I’m looking at the condition of the roads, what kind of cracks, what’s coming through them, what, how, how much of the general public as a whole uses this road?” said Bowers.  “And then everything that I can get off the side of it, you know, like all of our the dead end streets off of it, the smaller secondary chutes off a main road, that kind of tells me if we need to mill it and deep mill patch it, then pave it. You. The striping is everywhere. Anytime we do a road, we got to stripe it. So, I mean, there’s a lot of variables that go into choosing roads and where we’re at, and we try to get equal amount of miles within the whole county.”

The county has also committed to several bridge projects in the coming years along Lee Clarkson Road, East Armuchee Road, Manning Mill Road and West Cove Road, among others. SPLOST would provide a dedicated funding source for these projects, as well as $4-million to replace old equipment that keeps breaking down.

“It puts the community in a bad spot, like mowing season right now, I’ve got several roads that the grass is four or five feet high,” said Bobby Snider, Road Department Director. “And that’s a lot of the issue that we’ve been having last year and this year, this year, we’ve been down quite a few times with the equipment down. I’ve got probably three tractors down right now, and it isn’t the mechanics, it’s the parts being on back order. There’s no way to speed the process up because we don’t have spare tractors to run another one out there. If one’s broke, it’s broke, and you’re down to one tractor. There’s been two times this season that I know that three of my different mowing crews have had one tractor, and at one point, these two mowing crews that didn’t have any tractors, both of their tractors was broke, and when you’re waiting on parts, there’s nothing you can do.”

Snider says patching up equipment to keep it running for 20-years means when the county does replace it, there is no trade-in value and it’s only worth a few hundred dollars as scrap. “You need to put them on a rotation, like other businesses and counties do, after so many years or so many miles, they’ll change their equipment out, and that can be nice for us to be able to get into that situation, but I know it takes more splost money and more tax dollars to do all that, but it’d be good to try to implement it in small increments until we could get back in that situation.”

The 2026 SPLOST would fund $13-million in capital improvements for Public Works in Walker County, second only to improvement for Fire Rescue.