McHenry County Blog

Pushing Township Road Tax Dollars Further

Take a look at this asphalt spreader that Greenwood Township has.

It’s homemade, so to speak.

It wasn’t purchased.

That is, Greenwood Township Road Commissioner Roger May’s men made it.

It’s not made out of metal.

It’s made out of wood.

Except for a height-adjusting device, which you can see in the third picture.

I remember when the Riley Township Road Commissioner bought a used factory made asphalt spreader. He used it to pave roads cheaper than it could be done by a contractor.

Now, it appears that the Greenwood Township folks have done him one better.

The crew has been patching HIghland Shores subdivision on the west side of Wonder Lake the last month or so.

They are not building new roads. It’s just long patches.

This past week Foreman Frank Nordmeyer and his crew were doing part of West Lake Shore Drive north of the beach.

Having traveled gravel township roads in various parts of Illinois, I know there is not enough road money to go around.

I wonder if more rural township road commissioners could follow the example set by Roger May and build their own asphalt spreaders. In the smaller townships, they might have to get together with their neighbors to pull it off, but ambitious road commissioners might be able to pull it off.

My in-laws have had problems of water flowing into their septic field when it rains really hard. It wasn’t that way originally. Then the road was lower than the driveway.

But as additional layers of asphalt were put down on the street, its level got higher.

This week the crew built a small lip or berm at the end of the road in an attempt to keep the water on the right-of-way.

This is an example of why road commissioners are generally the most popular township officials. There’s not a lot of service a public official can do that is more personal than fixing a person’s road.