The engineer’s office designs, builds, and maintains 266 miles of county and township roads, 398 bridges, and 927 culverts. Cities in Butler County manage their own road maintenance and paving programs, but county engineer Greg Wilkens’ office bids and supervises township road projects, and the townships pay for the work.
“It’s a standard year, typical,” Wilkens said. “There’s some inconvenience while we try to execute it, our problem is we can’t execute everything in the summertime, when we try to do a lot of it, from the standpoint of not disrupting the schools. But we find more and more we just can’t squeeze it all in.”
There is only one big intersection improvement this season and the $1.36 million project to install a roundabout on the north leg of the Millikin Road and Lesourdsville West Chester Road began May 27. There are detours “they’re out there full swing and hopefully they’ll get it open before school.”
Traffic is also detouring around the Trenton Franklin bridge replacement over Kemp Run in Madison Twp. and Wilkens said that the $963,412 project should be finished by the end of the month. He said ODOT has a project near there at Elk Creek Road and Ohio 122 and while the two “aren’t directly connected it’s going to put some more traffic on local roads.”
There will also be a detour starting in July around the $2 million Minton Road bridge replacement in Hanover Twp. A map of detours and projects can be found at bceo.org.
A few of the bridges are on the project list for this year because they are “design build” but construction likely won’t begin until 2026. Wilkens can save 10-12% on this method because the contractor designs and builds the structure and the design cost is covered by the grant. Wilkens culled $7.6 million worth of grant funding this year and has already secured $8.9 million for four 2026 projects.
He is also repaving six county roads and eight main streets in Fairfield, Hanover, Liberty, Oxford, Ross, St. Clair and West Chester townships for a total of 35.3 miles. Roughly 2 miles in Liberty Twp. will also be resurfaced with black mat sealant. The $8.4 million paving contract was awarded in March and the work began in April in the northwest side of the county, They are moving clockwise through the project.
The bid actually came in $219,997 less than the $8.6 million engineering estimate. In fact all of the contracts have come in very close to the estimates. Wilkens said inflation in his world has finally slowed.
“We’ve seen almost a 20% drop in our asphalt resurfacing price and we’re glad to see that,” Wilkens said. “All the rest of the inflation throughout has kind of calmed down, leveled out and plateaued right now. So that’s a good thing. You had that hyper inflation from a few years ago, that’s really difficult.”
In 2023 Wilkens’ annual capital budget was $30 million because they increased bid estimates by 13.6% to reflect inflation and other post-pandemic pressures like labor and supply shortages.
The on-again, off-again tariff situation hasn’t really bothered Wilkens’ bottom line.
“I don’t know that we’ve seen the direct impact of that, at least we can’t put our finger on it to say it’s a direct impact to the tariff,” Wilkens said. “Steel-wise all our contracts always use U.S. steel so that was not problematic by the tariffs.”
A major project that isn’t under Wilkens’ control is the $50 million Millikin Road interchange at Interstate 75 project in Liberty Twp. The county commissioners recently agreed to send a support letter for $10 million — they have already committed $12.75 million in county funds to the massive project — in construction money to the Transportation Review Advisory Council (TRAC).
TRAC has already awarded $10.5 million for engineering and right-of-way and the project is in the land acquisition phase now. The Butler County Regional Transportation District is managing the project that began in 2019 and Director Dan Corey told the Journal-News these types of projects usually take a decade. He said the latest application for funds is typical.
“We just keep chasing more,” he said. “This is just an application, we do a lot of applications, we don’t always win ‘em, that’s the problem, there’s always more people asking for more money than awarded. So we’ll ask and see where we land.”
So far, $21.75 million has been secured for preliminary work like engineering and right-of-way and the county and Liberty Twp. have committed $10 million each for construction, that is estimated at $25 million to $30 million.
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