County road building

[ASRG]

My local county is rebuilding the road beside my place. They are taking 5 meters (1 acre) and another 5 meters for
backsloping (not buying it).
$3910 for the acre they are buying. $1700 for the backslope, plus $350/acre loss of use X 2 = $700. $150 for seeding and $150 for spraying on the backslope. All on native pasture.
They are building me a new "county B" fence and putting in a 32 foot approach with ww steel gates.
This seemed like a pretty fair deal to me?

[Horse]

ASRG Does the county of Red Deer still have its own construction equip? We have ours here and all they do now is build machinery roads that no one lives on I feel just to keep the crew working and at $150K per mile I think we should dump the county owned equipt.
Most of our roads are in fair condition and machine roads are quite usable.

[ASRG]

No. Red Deer County privatized everything several years ago (about 2002). Alberta Highways (a private company) is contracted for all maitenance work and any construction is tendered.
They sold all the equipment and shops. I think they let 38 employees go. Since then they have hired a lot of office staff....more than the 38 workers who actually did anything! They claim they have saved $ millions, however operating costs have more than doubled over the ten years to about $38 million.
I believe the overall budget is over $65 million for 2012.
I don't think any other municipality in the province would want to copy Red Deer county.