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A Holmes County undertaking that has made Holmes County’s byways among the best in the state is heading back to the November ballot.

The county hopes to see overwhelming support of the Holmes County Sales Tax Levy, which has helped maintain the county’s roads for the past decade.

The tax levy is a renewal of the existing levy, providing revenue for county permanent improvements for a five-year period of one quarter of 1%.

LORAIN COUNTY, Ohio — A new roundabout is under construction in Lorain County.

Crews have closed a portion of the LaGrange Road and Oberlin Elyria Road intersection for the installation of a roundabout. Construction on the project started two weeks ago. In that time, crews have made progress on the east side of the roundabout.

The Lorain County Engineer's Office said the intersection of LaGrange and Oberlin Elyria roads has been on its radar for quite some time.

The office said the intersection had been the site of serious crashes throughout the years.

Summit County Engineer Alan Brubaker, P.E., P.S. would like to draw attention to increasing financial pressures facing local infrastructure systems, as counties across the nation grapple with rising costs and constrained revenues. A recent opinion article published by Governing.com underscores these challenges, highlighting the growing gap between the need for safe, reliable roads and the funding available to maintain them.

Locally, the Summit County Engineer’s Office reflects this national trend. In 2025, the office operated with approximately $19 million in tax revenue and approximately $20 million in operating expenses and capital improvement projects.

Picture a grain elevator in rural Missouri on a harvest morning. A line of loaded semis snakes back a quarter-mile. Each loaded truck then travels county roads to reach the rail silo, the barge and the world market. The farmer’s margin — already thin — depends on that road holding under 80,000 pounds of corn.

Now picture that road after a wet spring: a frost-heave crack running shoulder to centerline. The county engineer knows it needs work. It’s been an issue for years. But the budget math no longer works.

Counties stand to receive a healthy infusion of funding to address bridges under the surface transportation bill, BUILD America 250 Act (H.R. 8870) passed May 22 on a bipartisan basis by the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The five-year reauthorization includes a total of $580 billion, $30 billion more than 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Estimates show that counties and other local governments will have access to 22 percent of funding in the bill, through formula set-asides, suballocation and discretionary grant opportunities, adding up to a 270% increase in funding for county-owned bridges, which could not come too soon, because more than 40,000 county-owned bridges are structurally deficient.