Murrayville Road Project Sees Delay, County Commissioners Re-Organize Board

By Jeremy Coumbes on December 12, 2022 at 3:12pm

One major road project in Morgan County is complete, while another will take longer than expected to finish.

The Morgan County Commissioners received an update on ongoing road projects during their regular meeting this morning. Highway Department Director Matt Coultas told the board this morning that the Arenzville-Concord blacktop project is officially complete following a recent final walk-through.

Coultas says the other project in the southern part of Morgan County is suffering from what has become a common problem with the supply chain. “The Murrayville Road project operations have halted for the winter season. The contractor is in the process of ordering the drainage structures and they are not anticipating delivery of those until August. So this is going to be delayed till the latter part of the next construction season.”

The Murrayville Road project was anticipated to be completed early in the 2023 construction season and will see the road resurfaced from Route 267 through Murrayville and on to US 67.

The Board also approved the 2023 Motor Fuel Tax Account Expenditures which are estimated to total just over $1.3 million dollars.

In other business the morning, the County Board approved a resolution agreement between the Morgan County State’s Attorney’s Office and the Appellate Prosecutor’s Office for the coming year.

The cost of the contract with the county is $14,000.00. Morgan County State’s Attorney Gray Noll says the contract saves the county a large sum of money annually. He says his office mostly uses the Appellate Prosecutor’s Office to handle any cases that are appealed in Morgan County.

Noll says appeals are something that would require at least one if not two more attorneys on staff to handle in-house. He says a handful of other tasks are handled through the agreement with the Appellate Prosecutor’s Office.

Other than that they offer a variety of services for tax objection services, conflict cases, if my office has a conflict on a criminal matter they are kind enough to come in as a special prosecutor, and they provide a variety of continuing legal education seminars for myself and attorneys.”

The Commissioners also completed the re-organization of officers for the coming year, unanimously approving Ginny Fanning as Chairwoman and Mike Wankel as Vice Chair.