Taxpayers foot bill for road repairs

Agriculture has been exempt from zoning regulations.

DAYTON (AP) — Heavy truck traffic from large grain and livestock farms is inflicting wear and tear on Ohio’s rural roads, and the cost of repairing and maintaining them often falls to taxpayers.

Numerous western Ohio counties with large livestock farms have had to repair road damage from farm equipment, in some cases spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Putnam County’s Palmer Township in northwest Ohio is spending $500,000 to replace a road damaged by traffic to and from a big dairy, five times the county’s annual $100,000 budget for road maintenance.

Nearby Williams County has spent $300,000 to upgrade four miles of roads. This year, the county began deploying portable scales and devoting two full-time deputies to a truck-weight enforcement program, in part due to complaints about road damage from large dairy farm traffic.

Not all farms that require Ohio Department of Agriculture permits — dairy farms with 700 or more cows, or egg farms with 125,000 or more chickens — must work with local officials to resolve infrastructure issues. That’s a requirement for farms with at least 7,000 dairy cattle or 1.25 million egg-laying hens.

“What might be helpful would be some sort of large-scale agricultural zoning,” said Defiance County Engineer Warren Schlatter. Agriculture traditionally has been exempt from zoning regulations.

Van Wert County Engineer Kyle Wendel said some local officials hesitate to approach the largest livestock farmers.

“You’ve got to cater to people like that,” he said. Farming “drives our economy.”

But unlike farms, large retailers are often made to pay infrastructure costs when they open stores, said Wood County resident Sue Torrey, who heads the Ohio Alliance for Responsible Agriculture, a network of Ohio citizens groups opposed to large livestock farms.

“When a megadairy comes to town, it hides under the exemption of agriculture,” Torrey said.

Farmer Dennis Verhoff, a trustee in Palmer Township, is wary of subjecting the largest farms to too many regulations.

“Most of the farmers are getting bigger trucks and bigger wagons,” he said. “It’s not just the megadairies and the megafarms. We’ve got to watch what we wish for.”

Darke and Mercer county officials project that large farms for which they set up tax-increment financing agreements will generate sufficient tax revenues to fund road repairs. Through such agreements, a portion of the additional property tax dollars paid by the large farms are earmarked to pay for road improvements.

But in Paulding County, which has 10 such financing districts around large livestock farms, revenues from those agreements haven’t kept pace with repair costs, said county Engineer Travis McGarvey.