“As everyone in the state knows, our roads are in really rough shape,” Vanderburgh County Commissioner Cheryl Musgrave said. “You can’t have a great community with substandard roads, period.”

The county is expecting to spend more than $5 million on improving some 34 miles of roadway.

Musgrave says she has spent her public life working towards improving county roads. A couple of years ago she worked to support and craft a resolution that increased state gas taxes for road funding.

The county applied for the Community Crossings Grant asking for details about which road gets work.

Musgrave says the commission has asked the county council for an additional $600,000 to $700,000. However, she says more work could be done to revitalize southwestern Indiana.

“Have we been aggressive enough with the state on state roads? I don’t think so,” she said.

Musgrave said she believes officials are too laid back when meeting with state representatives.

“We ought to do more shouting, in fact, we probably should do more shouting than people closer to Indianapolis because we are so far away, so out of mind,” she said.

The Vanderburgh County Commission determines which roads need the most improvement, and with gas tax funding becoming available last year, that money has since been put to work.

“We are focused on the repaving and patching but we are also focused on the bigger prize of the redevelopment of roads,” Musgrave said. “The engineering for those is underway and now it’s more than $60 million in projects and residents will start seeing those orange barrels soon.”

The City of Evansville has $3.65 million budgeted for road repairs as well. Some projects are already underway and the rest will be completed through September.