A day before the deadline for the wish lists from county officials on how they would like to spend Community Development Block Grants, County Engineer Doug Cade has put in his pitch for almost $300,000 of the funds.

Right now for 2014, $178,000 is scheduled to come into Lawrence County — $143,100 for exclusive county use and $34,900 for the City of Ironton. However the county can apply to boost that figure in three categories that if approved could bring in $900,000 in CDBG money.

The three categories, whose cap is $300,000 each, are downtown areas, neighborhood stabilization and critical infrastructure.

The Lawrence County Commissioners asked officials in townships and villages to submit their ideas of focusing the funds by today.

Cade, who made his request at Tuesday’s county commission meeting, wants to pay for three county road-paving projects. The commission met earlier this week because of the annual Chamber of Commerce Legislative Day trip to Columbus on Thursday, which is its regular meeting date.

First on his list is repaving 1.4 miles of County Road 14 at Waterloo, at the cost of $85,000.

“The last time it was paved was 1995,” Cade said.

The next two are county roads that are currently gravel that the engineer wants to asphalt pave.

“One of our goals is to try to reduce the number of gravel roads,” Cade told the commissioners.

There are 10 miles of gravel roads in the county, 100 miles of chip and seal and 270 miles of asphalt.

Cade also would like $110,089 to pave County Road 193 E that carries a heavy amount of logging traffic and $104,907 for County Road 41 South in Decatur.

“We would like to convert all roads to hot mix asphalt, but have to take care of what we have,” he said. “We can’t do it all at once, but we are getting there.”