The laws of the State require that bridge designs be prepared for counties by the Highway Department, upon the request of County Courts. Twelve counties have taken advantage of this law during the past two years and have called upon the Department for designs for a total of thirty-four bridges and six culverts, and of these structures twenty-seven bridges and four culverts have been built.
A total of ninety-five bridges and fifteen culverts were designed by the Bridge Department, of which fifty-nine bridges and eleven culverts have been constructed.
COST KEEPING
The keeping of an accurate segregation of expenditures and a detailed distribution of costs for an organization handling the amount of work and the character of work handled by the Highway Department is a matter of the greatest importance. The Highway Department seldom has under way less than eighty or ninety separate and distinct jobs. These jobs are scattered all over the State, and few of them are of sufficient size to warrant the employment of timekeepers on the jobs to keep exact records of expenditures and costs. The records for all of these jobs must be kept in the main office where it is impossible for those keeping the records to be personally familiar with the details of the numerous expenditures made on each of the many jobs.
To secure proper records of expenditures, therefore, a system of cost keeping must be used which requires little attention from the engineers and superintendents in charge of the various jobs, and at the same time gives sufficient information to those keeping the records in the main office to enable them to segregate all expenditures so that detailed information as regards total expenditures, monthly expenditures, expenditures from different funds, expenditures for different purposes, unit costs, etc., are readily available at any time, and in such form that all jobs may be combined to give total expenditures of various kinds, so that the Department is always Informed as to the financial status of each job and of all jobs.
The system of cost keeping now in use by the Department has been evolved from a number of other systems in use on work of a similar nature, and is a system specially devised to meet the requirements of the Department. For every cent expended by the Highway Department or under its supervision, there appears in the cost records, entries which give at a glance the name of the County in which the expenditure is incurred, the name of the particular job, whether it is an engineering cost or a construction cost, the particular part of the work involved, the fund from which it is paid, and a reference to the original invoice or statement upon which the payment is made. These records are so arranged and so summarized each month that almost any desired combination of costs is available, such as the totals for each county, for each job, for each fund, for engineering, for construction, for surveys, for administration, for construction engineering, etc.
The expenditure tabulations given in various parts of this report, and especially those in the part devoted to the Financial Report, give a good idea of the results being obtained with the system in use although they do not give the detail which is readily available in the records themselves.
EMPLOYES IN THE UNITED STATES ARMY SERVICE
The State Highway Department is very proud of its representation in the Army Service and in recognition of the patriotism of those employes who have gone to the Front, the Department has maintained a Service Flag upon which there are now sixty stars. The men represented by these stars are listed on the following Roll of Honor: