4 ms·

>I'd expect that a county has sufficient need to build roads that a small construction crew + equipment could be kept on staff for road work. Not so sure about

• jjk166 6y ago
  Let's say a county is a 15 mile by 15 mile square with a square grid of streets spaced on average 1000 feet apart. That would be 2370 miles of road in the county. Assuming a lifetime for that road of 35 years, they need to replace 68 miles of road per year which works out to about 1000 feet per day. At $1.5/.32 miles, they would be spending $881K per day on road replacement. If a county run crew could cut 10% of this cost out, and 50% of that was used for labor, they could employ 198 people at 80k per year on average. A paver capable of paving 1000 feet of 24 foot wide road per day costs approximately 60k. Assuming 10% of cost savings went towards capital equipment, they could purchase 52 such pavers per year. For a more reasonable but still quite liberal budget of $1 million per year of capital equipment financing and maintenance payments and salaries of $200k for 40 employees, that 10% cost savings would allow the county to pocket $22 Million per year. Even if the streets were spaced on average 1 mile apart, that would still be 100 feet per day, and the 10% cost reduction would be $3 million per year. This does not include new construction or regular maintenance of roads, nonetheless other construction projects. Only very small or sparsely populated counties should have any trouble justifying the expense of an in-house construction crew.