11/9/24, Press Times – On Oct. 30, local leaders met to discuss the area’s transportation infrastructure accomplishments and opportunities, as well as ongoing challenges for developing and maintaining the transportation network, at the National Railroad Museum in Ashwaubenon.
The roundtable, which featured Outagamie County Highway Commissioner Dean Steingraber, Ellington Town Chairman Joe Schumacher, Ashwaubenon Village Manager Joel Gregozeski, Ashwaubenon Village Manager, and Green Bay Director of Public Works Steve Grenier, was led by Transportation Development Association of Wisconsin Executive Director Debby Jackson.
Ashwaubenon Village President Mary Kardoskee and League of Wisconsin Municipalities Executive Director Jerry Deschane also participated in the event, welcoming local legislators and legislative hopefuls to the discussion.
“The real challenge right now is maintain roadways in our in our town. The money is generated mainly through general levy, transportation aid, shared revenue,” Schumacher explained.
“We are mainly agricultural and residential. Like everybody knows, in agriculture the equipment’s getting bigger and bigger. Crops, they’re producing a heck of a lot more. Right now, we’ve got a lot of roads that are actually being broken up through that – through manure hauling and through the crop hauling.
“It’s something that we need; for our economy, we need the farming. Our other thing, we have numerous quarries in our town. That Highway 15 project, all of that came out of a quarry in our township.
“We need the quarries. We need the money to keep our economy going, to build our infrastructure for safe roads and different things like that. Again, our roads were not developed or designed for those truckloads. That’s our biggest challenge — those two industries.”
Schumacher said the roads are in bad condition and need work.
“If we would do one mile of roadway a year [just the surface] it would take us 60 years to get around our town and our roads are not going to hold up for 60 years,” he said.
While Schumacher said that the town was able to obtain grants for some of the work, he added “those grants are going to be there all of the time.”
Gregozeski said that Ashwaubenon has had three major road projects over the past 18 months.
“So, I know we’re talking about some of the challenges that we’re facing, I’m going to touch on some of the successes, but then the story behind the story. So we have three particular projects. All of these projects were supported through Tax Incremental Financing. So that has been a tool that we have used to support infrastructure projects in our municipalities,” he said.
“However, if it weren’t for Tax Incremental Financing, these projects likely would not have happened, and that’s where kind of the bigger story comes into play because each of these projects were fairly expensive projects in general.”
Steingraber also mentioned inflation and workforce development, while Grenier discussed multi-modality — multiple means of transportation avenues to address — as challenges.
Grenier said that the quality of transportation infrastructure is critical to the economic vitality of communities and regions.
“These are the kind of tough conversations and very frank discussions that we need to have, so that you at the state level can understand some of the challenges that we are up against where the rubber meets the road,” Grenier added.