LIVE OAK — With a change in how the Florida Department of Transportation will be funding projects, the Suwannee County Board of County Commissioners added five road improvements projects to its Capital Improvement Plan at its meeting last week.

But the board also is bracing for fewer projects to be completed moving forward while also looking to try and get the funding increased.

The five projects have all been previously submitted to FDOT but have not been funded yet. According to County Administrator Randy Harris, FDOT is now requiring the projects to be listed and prioritized on a Capital Improvement Plan in order to be funded in the future.

“They’ve discussed these projects with us and to be honest with you, they gave me the impression it could be 15 years before the fund a project beyond these,” Harris told the board at the Dec. 4 meeting.

The five projects are 76th Street from U.S. Hwy. 90 to 225th Road, County Road 137 from U.S. 90 to CR 136, CR 49 from CR 252 to the north end of phase 1 CR 49 reconstruction, CR 250 from State Road 51 to the river and CR 136 from Live Oak city limit to 6/10 of a mile east of Hogan Road.

Harris also noted that work is beginning on CR 49 at the south end of the county but with the amount received from FDOT, the work won’t make it to CR 252 where the next project is set to begin according to FDOT.

“That’s going to leave a void,” Harris said, adding that the second phase of the project isn’t expected to be funded until 2024. “We’re going to try and talk to them and see if they can figure out how to fix that.”

Debbie Vickers, with the county’s Public Works Department, said in response to a question from Commissioner Clyde Fleming that the last time CR 49 was paved was in 1999 when it was the first Small County Road Assistance Program (SCRAP) project in the State of Florida.

That time, the road was just resurfaced, Vickers said.

Harris and Chairman Ricky Gamble have also previously had discussions with FDOT officials about starting the CR 49 project at the north end, where there is base failure occurring near U.S. Highway 90.

However, Harris advised the board that FDOT said their system won’t allow that change to the project to occur.

Instead Harris said the county’s road department will have to make repairs to those areas of the road until the project can be completed in 2024.

“We’re going to have to go out there and do those repairs because that base failure is so bad that people are leaving that outer edge and driving over in the middle of the road to avoid those bad spots,” he said.

“I was kind of holding out hope that DOT would come up with a solution for us. That isn’t acceptable waiting until 2024.”

Harris also told the board that he had discussed with Gamble the need to go lobby the state legislature’s transportation appropriations committee in an effort to get more funding for FDOT.

“See if we can’t get them to find some funding for the programs that affect rural communities,” Harris said. “That’s our plan going forward.”

Gamble added that the lack of projects being funded is a multiple-pronged issue: municipalities have started being funded by FDOT as well as the counties and FDOT has changed the way they view the process, looking at the total cost of a project instead of just funding projects regardless of cost.

“These are big projects that we’re doing and it’s eating up our funding,” he said.