The Morgan County Commissioners approved documents last Monday to request bids through the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Motor Fuel Tax highway and road maintenance program.
The request for bids for both the county and the road townships have been sent to IDOT by Morgan County Highway Engineer Matt Coultas. Coultas told the commissioners that the bids would be opened at the Morgan County Highway Department Office at 10AM on March 7th.
Coultas told the commissioners he doubled the size of the MFT [Motor Fuel Tax] program this year because some of the materials the county has previously used are nearly depleted. He says this year’s oil and chip program would cover approximately 44 ½ miles or one-quarter of all the roads in the county. He says that the bid sheet also included about 450,000 feet of pavement markings in total.
Coultas said after the meeting that the highway department is just looking primarily at road maintenance this year: “As far as the highway department itself, we don’t have any major road constructions projects. We are going to be basically doing maintenance this year in 2025. However, I do have a number of road district and township bridges that we are working towards and trying to utilize the rest of the R.B.I. [Rebuild Illinois] funds that was distributed over the last 5-year period. I’ve got two more bridges in Road District #1 that we are targeting and two in Road District #8. We pretty much got everything done [last year] that we needed to get done, so we don’t have any Spring-type work that we need to complete with contractual-type projects.”
Coultas says for now they are still focused on getting through the remaining winter weeks ahead, with the projected snowfall in the middle of this week.