Laurens County Commission OKs $5 million in road projects

The Laurens County Commission last week approved more than $5 million in contracts for road projects.

The road work was split into two lists, large and small projects, with the contract for the smaller ones including city of Dublin streets as a cost-cutting measure.

“Those small projects include the subdivisions you all identified and some of those city streets,” County Administrator Bryan Rogers told the commissioners. “The city came in with us, and we bid a lot of their small projects. Some of their projects are only a couple of hundred feet long. Normally you think some of those bigger contractors, they’ll really jack the price up on all of that.”

The small projects bid went to Reeves Construction for $956,000, which Rogers described as “a really good bid for us.”

The Scruggs Co. was awarded a $4.2 million contract that includes work funded through the Transportation Investment Act (TIA) and a regional sales tax approved in 2022 by voters in Laurens and 16 other counties. Two of the larger projects – the resurfacing and widening of Old Macon Road and Snellbridge Road – recently were pushed forward on the timeline by the state Department of Transportation.

The Old Macon Road project is budgeted for about $1.7 million, and the Snellbridge Road for about $1.4 million.

“They’re really large projects,” Rogers said. “Also, it increases quantity, which helps us on the pricing.”

Rogers said splitting the projects into large and small categories will allow the county to get the majority of the projects completed by Dec. 31. “

Also last week, the commission approved a $70.5 million budget for the new fiscal year, which began July 1. Rogers and commission members praised department heads and employees for their efforts to reach an agreeable spending plan.

“We got things in that they need, but at the same time they held back on their wants,” Rogers said.

The budget includes about $3.2 million in TIA funds for the large road projects and about $2 million in Local Maintenance and Improvement Grant (LMIG) funding, paid through the state’s gasoline tax, for smaller projects.

After the meeting, the commissioners showed off the county’s new fire truck – a 2025 Freightliner commercial pumper purchased from Fouts Fire. The trucks are not cheap – with a price tag of more than $400,000 – but the purchase will be paid through funds from the SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax).

The new truck will be assigned to Fire Station 10, off Valambrosia Road, which serves the industrial area around Ga. 257. Commissioner Gerad Mathis, a volunteer fireman, said the new truck shows voters “how important it is to keep the 1-percent tax going.”

“It’s a very important tax for the county,” he said. “It’s keeping the millage rate low.”