A bumpy ride may still be ahead for the Cass County maintenance director’s mission to repair the county’s ailing parking lots.

Dave Dickey, head of the county’s maintenance division, presented a pair of estimates for repair work to the asphalt at the law and courts, county annex and jail lots to the Cass County Board of Commissioners during its committee of the whole meeting Tuesday in Cassopolis. The maintenance director reported that two firms, Dowagiac’s Chorba Construction and Elkhart’s Quality Construction, recently surveyed the parking lots and delivered estimates of $64,000 and $38,000 for the repair work, respectively.

The deterioration of the parking lots has been on Dickey’s radar for the last seven years, though repair work has been in the maintenance department’s capital improvement plan since 2007, he said. The low-end price estimate for the repair work has increased nearly three fold since the last time Dickey had the lots evaluated in 2012, due to greater number of lots that have experienced damage.

“If you go down to the jail and drive around to the visitor’s parking and the back parking lot, there [are] holes back there,” Dickey said. “We could have a pond in a couple of those areas. It has gone downhill that quickly.”

One of the photos Dickey provided the board showed a crevice in one of the parking lots that measured nearly 3 inches wide and nearly 4 inches deep.

Funding has not been allotted in this year’s budget for the repair work, Dickey said. Although the county purchasing policy normally requires departments to formally place such projects out for bid in a request for proposal document — requiring a survey by an engineering firm —Dickey was hoping the two estimates he received would be sufficient enough to fulfill this requirement, he said.

“It is a solution for a problem,” he said. “It stops any additional costs. I was trying to move forward more quickly than going through that [RFP] process.”

While many board members agreed the issue should be addressed, the commissioners did not make a decision on how to address the problem during Tuesday’s meeting.

Although he left the decision up to the commissioners’ discretion, Dickey said that the damage to the lots is getting dramatically worse by the day.

“This [repair work] needs to be done, and it needs to be now,” he said.