The Niles Star

Editorial: 2009 dominated by road rebuilding, customer service

Monday, Oct. 19, 2009

A move the Cass County Board of Commissioners made almost two years ago is paying big dividends today.

That was the decision to expand the county Road Commission from three members to five. Interviews conducted Nov. 1, 2007, of eight finalists for two new January 2008 seats produced the Road Commission’s current dynamic leadership, Manager Louis Csokasy and Chairman LeRoy Krempec.

The Road Commission always prided itself on performance and on being one of the few Michigan counties with its own asphalt plant, but was not as oriented toward regarding the public as paying customers or leanness demanded by finite resources.

As recently as the Jan. 15 presidential primary ballot, the Road Commission counted on two millage questions.

Each sought a half mill, or 50 cents per $1,000 state-equalized value for four years, 2008-2011, to generate $828,400.

Csokasy, a Detroit native, has a master’s degree in business.

He had a 28-year first career. He started off as a design engineer and finished up as president of an automotive group – a $700 million business with 4,000 employees working under him at eight manufacturing sites on four continents.

“My impression of the Road Commission is that it’s an internal organization,” Csokasy forecast at his interview. “It needs to be much more refocused on the customer. That’s a long process to undertake. But it appears to me that the organization needs to be more responsive to taxpayers.”

So in 2009 the Road Commission has been working to not only close the gap between road reconstruction and road maintenance but also to raise “smile levels” of residents who use the road system. Reduced state funding, decisions about how to do more for less -and in less time – dominates decisions coming out of headquarters in Cassopolis.

Some of those were shared Thursday evening with the Board of Commissioners when Csokasy reviewed changes the agency is making to get the most bang for the public buck.
That includes not only moving to a preventive maintenance system that uses chip and seal to keep newer roads in better shape longer, but also to implement an in-house review system in customer service.

“It is not enough to say  I’m doing better today,” Csokasy said. “You have to point to something quantifiable that proves that the agency is better today.”

The longer Csokasy sits at the helm of the road commission, a position he assumed in March, the less sure he is the public really understands everything the road commission does.

“And they don’t need to,” he says. “When they need us, we have to be there.”

He points to a recent morning when high winds led to 39 telephone calls of trees down across the county’s roads.

That particular situation drove his thought process about what kinds of things to share with county commissioners that would better explain what really went on this year.

At this point, the agency has road work divided into two main areas – work inside of the white lines (road surface) and work outside of those lines. Work inside the white lines “is money  we actually spend on roads,” he said.

It does not include, as he explained, money spent on mowing grass within the commission’s 8,000 miles of road right of way, handling brush, paying for liability insurance, building, equipment and health insurance, or other expenses,

Of the road commission’s $6.8 million budget, $2.5 million of the money is being spent directly on roads. “In essence, we are Cass County’s maintenance department,” he said.
The commission is changing its focus regarding re-graveling, asphalting and chip and seal.

This year, road crews applied chip and seal to 13 miles of local roads and nearly 22 miles of primary roads, the latter paid for entirely with federal stimulus funds. A total of 5.68 miles of roads were re-graveled and another 22 miles were paved. Based on the agency’s current level of road spending, it hypothetically would take 38 years for the road crews to reconstruct every road in Cass County. In 2000, the span was 20 years, which is considered to be the life of a road. By 2008, the gap had increased to 66 years because money for improvement wasn’t there.