11/6/25, BELOIT DAILY NEWS – Beloit became the latest city in Wisconsin to make a plea to state legislators to invest more in the repair of crumbling roadways.
On Thursday morning, several city officials, the president of Blackhawk Technical College and a local business owner met at the intersection of Wisconsin Highway 81 and U.S. Highway 51 — or White Avenue and South Riverside Drive — to hold a “Re-VITAL-ize Highways and Wisconsin” news conference.
Re-VITAL-ize is an effort by the Transportation Development Association of Wisconsin to convince legislators that a lot more state dollars need to be invested into Wisconsin’s roads.
“The last couple of years, there have been increases in general transportation aid from the state, but the increases don’t even keep up with inflation,” said Bill Frisbee, Beloit’s director of public works. On Monday, the city passed its annual budget, which expects about $2.03 million in state aid for roads this year.
That may seem like a big number, but Frisbee said it’s nothing when you look at the enormity of Beloit’s road issues. In 2024, the Wisconsin Policy Forum published a report that showed Beloit’s road conditions rank in the bottom 10% in the state. Belot roads were ranked down near cities such as Kenosha and Milwaukee.
The report used the annual Pavement Surface Evaluation and Rating (PASER) for cities and townships statement. The PASER system grades roads on a 10-point scale with 10 being a newly built road less than a year old. Roads 4 and below basically need to be reconstructed. In 2024, the state’s average PASER rating was 6.2. Beloit’s was 5.1.
“We calculated that it would cost in the neighborhood of $200 million to get all of our roads up to an 8,” Frisbee said. “Typically, in an average year, there’s about $5 million a year in our capital improvement budget for roads so it would take about 40 years just to get caught up.”
Gov. Tony Evers did make highway reconstruction a priority in his last two biennial budgets. His last budget in July included a $715 million increase to the State Highway Rehabilitation Project.
Beloit will benefit from that program with a series of safety improvements at Milwaukee Road and White Avenue, White Avenue and Wisconsin, and the triangular intersection of Liberty Avenue, Madison Road, and McKinley Avenue.
Frisbee, though, said the state money will just fix the safety issues in those stretches.
“The (Liberty, Madison and McKinley) project is a great example because that’s up by Woodman’s (Markets) and has some pretty poor pavement,” Frisbee said. “It’d be nice if there was additional funding so they could link with the safety project and allow us to do it all in one shot.”
Beloit is the fourth city so far to hold a Re-VITAL-ize news conference, following Waterloo, Oshkosh, and Wisconsin Rapids, showing it’s far from the only municipality struggling to improve its roads.
According to a U.S. Bureau of Transportation annual study, Wisconsin ranked 38th out of 50 states in an annual road condition study. The BTS ranks roads as acceptable or not acceptable. In 2023, the most recent data available, 75.1% of Wisconsin’s roads were acceptable versus 81.1% for the U.S. as a whole. That hasn’t budged in 10 years. In 2013, Wisconsin ranked 38th.