Trumbull engineer gets legal opinion on sharing workers

Staff report

WARREN

The Trumbull County Engineer’s Office looks forward to continuing and expanding its use of workers from townships and villages to augment county highway workers for specific short-term projects.

Randy Smith, who is the county highway and sanitary engineer, proposed a new approach to getting potholes fixed last spring – borrowing workers from Howland Township and Lordstown for a month.

Smith consulted with the Trumbull County Prosecutor’s Office to ensure that it was legal to reimburse a township or village for work the townships’ or villages’ employees provide to the county.

Smith got the go-ahead to do it, but Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office was consulted to provide a legal opinion because the law was “a little ambiguous,” Smith said.

The opinion came back recently, saying Ohio law allows township and village workers to perform repairs on county roads for a county engineer “if there is an agreement in place to do so.”

The pothole program was undertaken last spring because potholes are one of the public’s biggest concerns, Smith said at the time.

The collaboration enabled the county to work more days and hours than would be possible without the collaboration.

“To me, it was a positive,” Smith said of last spring’s program. “We’ll take advantage of it as [much as] we possibly can.”

He said other areas for this type of collaboration could include crack-sealing and use of the mini-mill to repair areas of roads where potholes occur most.

The opinion also means villages and townships could pay the county engineer’s office for hours Smith’s employees would work for townships or villages, Smith said.