Morgan County Highway Department receives half of anticipated state funding

By Gary Scott on October 23, 2017 at 11:44am

Morgan County highways could see some effects from IDOT’s forfeiture of around $300 million in funding.

The Illinois Department of Transportation announced recently that it would be forfeiting about $300 million in funding due to budget reductions in the 2018 fiscal year as Illinois works out the kinks of its budget.

Director of the Morgan County Highway Department Matt Coultas provided a report at the Morgan County Commissioners meeting this morning. He says the county highway department only received about half of the funding that it had anticipated.

“I had attended the meeting in Moline with the county engineers group and we got to listen to Secretary of Transportation (Randall) Blankenhorn speak. We came to find out that the county level is effected by these maintenance cuts in the effect of our consolidated county and our needy township monies. So basically those areas of the program are cut in half. What we initially anticipated seeing, we ended receiving half of that funding,” says Coultas.

Coultas explains that not only will the lack of funding affect the county in 2018, but that the impact is already being felt this year.

“It was originally approached and discussed as if it would be FY ’18 monies, so I was not expecting that to come into effect into next October, but it actually did effect us this year. Unfortunately, our notification came after our maintenance season was over, so what monies were already expended, we can’t do much about that, we’ll just kind of have to watch and see how things are handled. We’re hoping for a light winter obviously, because that’s the late season effects we see on our funding sources. We’ll just have to play it by ear, I think for the most part everbody is on schedule with their programs, so we’ll just have to wait and see,” Coultas says.

According to Coultas, of the $300 million of funding that IDOT is forfeiting, $50 million of that was taken away from funding for local and county projects. In the end, Morgan County received a little over $73, 207 in state funding.