A 3-1 vote of the county commission will bring Baldwin County’s state roads a step closer to be fixed.

Baldwin County commissioners voted to approve an agreement with the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) to bring in over $100 million in funds to address needs on five Baldwin County roads that are managed by the state.

The proposal, which will contain $55 million in promised BP settlement funds and an additional $35.8 million from ALDOT, was originally removed from the consent agenda last week because two of the commissioners expressed they had some reservations with moving forward. The proposal concerned U.S. Highway 31 from Westminster Drive to Highway 181, Highway 181 from County Road 64 to 104, Highway 181 from 104 to County Road 32, State Route 180 west of the Foley Beach Express and State Route 180 east of the Beach Express. Commissioner Frank Burt continued to express concerns with the agreement, saying that the commission had made agreements with ALDOT in the past that the state failed to live up to.

“We gave them $13.4 million of Baldwin County taxpayers’ money to assure us they would takeover and build a four lane highway from 31 all the way to 98 south,” Burt said. “They spent our money and they just sort of quit.”

Burt said that while he hoped the state would live up to the new agreement, he couldn’t feel right about voting for the proposal.

“It just seems that we’re just signing another agreement that really just has a lot of attorney verbiage in there that gives ALDOT and the state of Alabama an upper hand,” Burt said. “If they can’t find the funds to get done, they’re supposed to put up some statement and the project can be delayed. We seem to have been mistreated so many times in the past. I’m not certain we will get to the final leg of it.”

Burt also questioned whether taxpayer funds would be used to make up the amount that Baldwin County had to guarantee for the agreement. Commission Chairman Chris Elliott assured Burt that the county felt reasonably assured that portion of money could come from Restore Act funds.

“This does not involve any county funds,” Elliott said. “This is really the tough part of governing, hard behind the scenes work to work with the legislative delegation and the mayors of the different municipalities, but we’ve all come together and agreed on these priorities and this is our shot to actually address these major issues. These are huge bottlenecks that are affecting quality of life in this county, and I’m excited to discuss it.” Commissioner Tucker Dorsey said the county and municipalities were all ready to go ahead and move forward with the projects as soon as possible.

“We’re talking about $126 million worth of projects,” Dorsey said. “We’ve just got to come up $35.8 million more in funding and we’ve got a good chance to do that with the Restore funds. The major problem we’ve had in this county with our roads are on these state roads and this gives us the best chance of actually fixing and finishing those roads.”