Toccoa City Commission Partnering with County to Resurface Roads

The Toccoa City Commission is awaiting an intergovernmental agreement with Stephens County that will allow them to resurface 26 city roads.

During the Commission’s work session yesterday, City Manager Billy Morse said that partnering with the county crew for this project will save money.

“Stephens County now has equipment and crews and they’re doing excellent resurfacing work if you’ve driven on their streets,” said Morse. “So we’re recommending that we partner with them in an intergovernmental agreement where county crews would resurface city streets. The county has given us a fair price for this work, but further they are saving us funds by we’re not having to hire a contractor or an engineering firm.”

Public Works Director Randy Smith says that he has looked at all the streets and ranked them excellent, good, poor or fair to determine which will be resurfaced.

“This is our simple form of just riding the streets looking at the traffic, the number of houses, if there’s churches or a school,” said Smith. “The DOT used to have a scoring system, 1-26, and by learning that years ago, that’s what we’re still working with but instead of giving numbers, I just give four groupings: excellent, good, fair and poor.”

However, according to Smith, just because a road is ranked as “poor” does not mean that it will be on the list. Other factors are taken into consideration when choosing the streets that will be repaired, such as the amount of traffic or how many houses are on it.

The resurfacing project will begin once the intergovernmental agreement is drawn up and then approved by the city commission.

Smith estimates that once the project is approved, it would be complete by the end of August.