Editorial: Kane County's Roads Are a Crisis. The Board Needs to Act This Fall.

Driving on Kane County roads has always required a certain tolerance for imperfection. The Fox Valley was built fast and built cheap, and the infrastructure shows it. But this spring, after another brutal freeze-thaw cycle, what was tolerable has become genuinely dangerous. The county's own road condition assessment — released with minimal fanfare last month — rates 38 percent of the county's 732 lane-miles of paved surface in poor or failing condition. That is not a maintenance backlog. That is a crisis.

The county board approved $2.3 million for road repairs in the most recent budget cycle. That figure is not a serious response to the problem. The Infrastructure Assessment Office estimated that bringing the county's road network back to good condition would require $64 million over five years at minimum. At the current spending rate, the board is addressing roughly three and a half percent of the problem per year while additional roads degrade. The math does not work. Patch repairs on failing roadbeds are not a plan; they are a delay that makes the eventual bill larger.