A Perry County company has gotten the bids to do a total of 15 miles of county and township roadways for a cost of approximately $1.3 million.

At bid openings on Tuesday Shelly Company from Thornville was chosen for two separate projects, both under the supervision of the county engineer’s office.

To pave 8 miles of county roads the company was the sole bidder at $758,644.20. That was just $100,000 under the county’s estimate of $866,685 or the equivalent of approximately $100,000 a mile.

“Last year it was $110,000 but now fuel costs are down,” Lawrence County Engineer Doug Cade said. “Then it was $4 a gallon. Now it is at $2.40.”

Each summer staff at the engineer’s office reviews all 140 county roads to determine which will be paved that year.

“We videotape every single road, every year,” Cade said. “We narrow that down to the top 20 roads that are in the worst condition as far as asphalt paving. Some might be worse, but they are chip and seal. We take those 20 roads and physically drive them to see which ones can last and which ones absolutely have to be paved.”

They take notes including which ones have bad ditches, crushed pipe or alligator-type cracking on the road.

“If you have a base failure, the asphalt will crack like that,” Cade said.

County paving project takes in roads in Windsor, Upper and Union townships.

Shelly Company also won the bid to pave 6.97 miles of township roads at $578,138 beating out the only other bidder, Nuko of Jackson, at $599,675.

Estimate for that project was $572,481.

“The township projects are much harder to construct than the county projects,” Cade said. “Typically township roads are much narrower and a lot of time the township roads are not in as good a condition.”

This is a joint paving project with the county as supervisor.

Those roads are in Lawrence, Elizabeth, Upper, Perry, Decatur, Windsor, Fayette and Rome townships.