The Lewis County roads fund is in a tough spot going into this year's budget season.
With rising costs and shrinking revenues, the fund faces a structural deficit, with Lewis County Public Works staff proposing drastic cuts in order to balance the budget through the end of the 2027 budget cycle.
The Lewis County Board of Commissioners held the first of three day-long budget meetings Wednesday, which included a rather bleak report on the roads budget.
Lewis County Public Works Director Geoff Soderquist and County Engineer Wesley Anderson led the presentation and hit home with one main message: the roads budget is in trouble.
“It's a real problem that we need to find a solution for,” Anderson said.
Before getting into details about their recommendations for how to balance the roads budget, the leading public works officials presented what appears to be a looming structural deficit.
Even with this year's annual revenues expected to come in more than $2 million more than annual expenses, with rising costs, shrinking tax revenue and the roads funds dwindling reserves, Soderquist and Anderson expect a roads budget shortfall by 2028 without drastic changes.
“A lot of other local agencies, counties, are in the same predicament we're in with the budget,” Anderson said. “Costs, inflation has skyrocketed over the last several years, and revenues just haven't matched.”
According to Anderson, the roads budget has seen a pattern of dwindling fund balance reserves since around 2015. While the fund’s ending balance recovered somewhat through 2023, ending at nearly $9 million, it has since plummeted and is expected to come in at around $1.2 million at the end of 2027.
That puts it far below the desired $10 to $12 million in reserves deemed fiscally prudent by public works officials.
“With what we went through with the FEMA funding this year, and the volatility of that, and our ability to respond to an emergency on our own accord in some sort of fashion, I think we should be shooting for somewhere around 12,” Soderquist said.
Soderquist and Anderson predict the roads fund will see roughly $21 million in regular expenses for 2027 and bring in around $23.5 million in regular revenue. They added that they predict they would need $29.5 million in revenue to “keep up.”
Regular expenses do not include the cost for individual projects, but rather the costs of staff wages, annual maintenance, etc.
“On the expenses side, it's the people. It's the vehicles. It's the buildings. It's not the projects that, again, are one-off expenses related to a year,” Soderquist said.
According to county officials, property tax and timber trust revenues have seen increases since 2022, but revenues from timber tax, the motor vehicle fuel tax and from state and federal sources such as Secure Rural Schools and the state's County Road Administration Board have shrunk over the last five years, all while costs for construction, wages, fuel and more have gone up.
Other increases, such as those in liability insurance and workers compensation, have also blown holes in the budget, with predicted liability insurance costs rising by more than $500,000 over the last five years.
In order to address the shortfall, the two public works officials proposed making cuts virtually everywhere, including not hiring replacements for eight of their 11 staff openings. At the same time, they defended retaining existing staff, who Anderson and Soderquist had nothing but high praise for.
Discussing staffing issues, Anderson specifically dismissed staffing levels as a major source for cost increases. While both officials admitted that staff costs have increased year over year due to cost-of-living increases, they also pointed to relatively steady staffing levels over the last five years and numbers significantly lower than roughly 20 years ago.
“We just don't see a trend where we're growing outside of the budget that we have in terms of personnel,” Anderson said. “It proves to me that we're doing more with less.”
The county officials also preserved enough to lay 100 miles of chip seal in 2027 in the proposed budget, arguing that doing less will result in more costly repairs in the future. Unlike most transportation projects, the county chip seal program is funded entirely by the county and the work is done by county crews rather than contractors.
Specific proposed cuts did include putting off replacing old equipment and cutting off a range of other transfers, including $90,000 used to fund stream gauges, $125,000 for roadside litter cleanup — that will now be covered entirely by the solid waste department — and an often-debated annual transfer to the Lewis County Sheriff’s Office of between $1.1 and $1.5 million to pay for traffic enforcement.
“It's not just the sheriff's transfer that we've cut out of the budget to make it balance,” Soderquist said. “We are looking every which direction.”
That transfer was cause for debate during the previous budget cycle, leading to Commissioner Lindsey Pollock to being the lone vote against the 2026 budget.
While the transfer was cut in order to make the current budget balance, Soderquist was also adamant that cutting the transfer does not fix the underlying structural deficit, even if the eventual reckoning was delayed by another year or two.
“I can't tell you what that number is, but I can tell you based off of what we're doing to get this one to balance that, yes, we will be in the hole,” Soderquist said.
