Fremont County will have more money to fix roads, now that voters have approved a 1-percent sales tax.
County Commission Chairman Doug Thompson says the state transportation funding hasn’t been adequate to properly maintain the county’s transportation infrastructure.
“There’s bridges that are starting to fall into disrepair,” Thompson said. “We have huge backlogs of road maintenance. … So this will allow us to do some maintenance projects that will keep us from having to rebuild the roads later on.”
Thompson expects that tax to bring in 7 million dollars, all of which will go toward roads. He says previous sales tax proposals have failed because they didn’t specify what the money would be used for.
“The voters didn’t trust the local governments, including the county, to just use it for a specific reason, like roads,” he said. “It’s always been an open-ended revenue stream, and the citizens would not go for that.”
Voters approved the tax 8,390 to 8,055.