Road Department Equipment

So how can a lawn mower attachment actually make Union County a better place to live? You know, it's easy to take our roadways for granted, but especially in a place like Union County, maintaining roads and roadways is a giant safety necessity.

Obviously, you have to keep the roadways and right-of-ways cut, keep 'em clean, keep it cut back, but one of the biggest issues you have, if you don't do that, then you have a site distance issue and our geographic site distance is critical. So, obviously, we have to keep the mowers on the road. The state doesn't get involved with county maintenance at all. The state maintains their roads. We're responsible for everything in the county.

The Union County Roads Department maintains over 800 total miles of county roads, approximately 500 miles being paved and about 300 being gravel roads. So, in order to maintain safe roadways, as you can imagine, it takes a lot of equipment.

A big variety of equipment from the summertime, when you're looking at a mower, front end loaders, spreader trucks to apply gravel to your gravel roads, asphalt pavers, dump trucks to put the asphalt out. Tree removal is a big issue with the county, so we have the bucket truck when we get the wind storms. We have had as many as 30 to 40 trees at one time. Chipper for tree removal.

Everything I've mentioned, the cost is gonna be astronomical when you replace any of this equipment. Most of our necessary road maintenance equipment these days is purchased with SPLOST funds. And again, there's no choice we have to buy this equipment. The only question is whether we do so one penny at a time sharing the cost with everyone who drives on our roads and shops in our stores, or do we put the entire burden on property taxpayers?