CHARLESTON — With a four-day deadline from Gov. Jim Justice, district engineers and county supervisors with the West Virginia Division of Highways submitted more than 3,200 pages ranking secondary roads and requesting additional support and equipment.

The state Department of Transportation released the lists Monday evening for the state’s 10 highways districts.

On March 19, Justice held a 15-minute meeting with DOH engineers and supervisors, giving them 72 hours to come up with lists of non-federal secondary roads in need of maintenance and what each district and county would need to repair those roads. He gave DOH staff another 24 hours to rank the roads by need.

By Friday, the Department of Transportation tweeted a picture of the stack of maintenance lists that was nearly 2 feet tall. The pages are extensive, totaling 3,225 and ranging from spreadsheets to handwritten notes.

While the 10 DOH districts have different terrain, common themes among districts include the need for ditch maintenance, patching, mowing and slip repair. Almost all the lists included requests for new equipment, such as Gradall excavators, mowers, dump trucks and pavers. Many requested additional workers to help complete the massive number of projects.

“It is my opinion that to aggressively tackle the issues we are facing in our county, a larger quota of employees is needed,” wrote Putnam County Highway Administrator Michael Aronhalt. “I feel that to achieve a larger staff there needs to be a quicker hiring process. I have found that many times, we have lost potential workers due to the length of the time from the applying to the hiring process is complete.”

According to Summers County Supervisor Gordy Hardy, DOH crews have focused more over the years on paving projects instead of core maintenance activities.

“I would like to see our organization move away from extensive paving and focus more on what our employees and equipment are best suited for, which is routine maintenance consisting of ditching, berming, pothole patching, pipe installation, grading gravel roads, mowing and brush cutting,” Hardy wrote. “I personally feel that, even if we add employees and equipment to perform paving and surface treatment activities, our core maintenance activities will suffer.”

A Legislative Auditor’s Office report released in February found that the majority of DOH districts, county offices and expressway organizations spent considerably less than the 70 percent of their funding — a benchmark in place since 2005 — for core maintenance required in their annual plans between fiscal years 2012 through 2018.

According to that report, DOH placed the blame for not making that 70 percent core maintenance benchmark on “weather challenges, labor challenges, possible accounting issues, influx of supplemental/special funds, and extended use of roads with the sudden boom of the natural gas industry and subsequent truck traffic in the areas of study.”

One of the 181 bills awaiting Justice’s signature or veto by today’s midnight deadline is Senate Bill 522, introduced by state Sen. Randy Smith, R-Tucker. The bill would allow DOH counties and districts to use pay-as-you-go monies collected from increased tax revenue and DMV fees being saved for debt service on Roads to Prosperity bonds but not needed yet for secondary road maintenance.

SB 522 would also allow DOH to contract with private companies to complete core maintenance if the county and district don’t make the 70 percent benchmark in the previous fiscal year. It required a website be built and maintained with a complete list of secondary road maintenance projects and their status.

Two weeks ago, Justice announced a similar plan, using pay-as-you-go money for secondary road maintenance. He also proposed scaling back Roads to Prosperity projects and using the savings for secondary road maintenance. During that meeting, he announced the appointment of former Raleigh County Commissioner Byrd White as acting transportation secretary to replace Tom Smith, who was fired. On Tuesday, Justice announced White as the permanent secretary.

“It is my No. 1 priority to get all our roads across the state in top shape as quickly as is reasonable and feasible to do,” Justice said. “Byrd completely understands my directive, and I am confident that he will carry this out professionally and efficiently.”

A fully prioritized list will be made available at a later date. The next step will be for Revenue Secretary Dave Hardy to figure out how to pay for the requests that are in hand.

Justice also announced the appointment Tuesday of Jimmy Wriston, a 12-year employee at the Department of Transportation, as acting DOH commissioner and deputy secretary of the Department of Transportation.