Battle continues with county roads

By SCOTT NILES Courier staff writer

May 20, 2008 12:50 am

— OTTUMWA — Area county engineers feel they are playing a “back and forth” game when it comes to fixing rural roads.
“They’ve dried out at times,” said Davis County Engineer Dave Grove. “And blading helps, but when it rains again the roads just get muddy and get rutted up again.”
Wapello County Engineer Brian Moore said after it rains, the roads are just so muddy that the rock will sink down into the ground.
But, the engineers remain optimistic that they will be able to make more progress as the weather continues to get warmer.
“We have gotten a lot of rock put down. We’ve probably contracted about 180 miles out of 520 so far,” Moore said. “Hopefully with plans by the end of the summer we will hit about 400 miles.”
Grove said workers in Davis County have been hauling rock when it’s not muddy and as long as the budget will allow.
“But we don’t even have enough money to cover all the roads,” he said.
He added it takes roughly 500 tons a mile to rock the roads. Grove estimates that it will take nearly $3 million to $4 million to cover all the roads in the county.
“We spent over $500,000 this fiscal year on rock and will spend another $100,000 between now and the end of the fiscal year, which ends June 30,” he said.
Wapello County is in a similar situation.
Moore said they will not have enough money in their budget to cover all the county roads and at the time they crafted their budget in December (for the upcoming fiscal year), it was before the serious winter weather struck the area.
For other counties the issue is not rock.
Van Buren County Engineer Ron Bonjour said they have their our own quarry and sometime in the last six months of the year they are going to let a contract to crush more stone, but for right now, he said they have some from the last time they crushed rock in 2006.
“We will probably take advantage of state farm-to-market funds, in which each county has an allotment. We have requested to the board [of supervisors] to use $200,000 for rock,” he said.
“We’ve been concentrating on getting the ruts bladed out of the roads right now. We try and get the ruts out so it won’t hold more water during the rain.”
Bonjour said they haven’t been unloading rock on all county roads, but have mainly hit the “soft spots.”
“Not all of them need rock,” he said.
Another area of concern — crowning and ditches.
“We are continually working on putting crowns back on the roads,” Grove said. “But it’s not something you can do with one blading. [It] takes several times with rock and then you have to go over it again.”
“When we get calls on soft spots we try and concentrate on those areas the most,” Bonjour agreed.
He said they have not put crowns back on all of the roads yet, but they are working on it.
“Crowns are not the biggest problem,” Bonjour said.
“Most county engineers will be will be blading, hauling rock and ditching pretty much all summer, I think,” Moore said. “We need to clean out the ditches and create better drainage.”
“It’s a continuous back and forth effort. Progress gets reversed when it rains a lot of times,” Grove said. “It’s all a weather game.”
Scott Niles can be reached at (641) 683-5360 or via e-mail at sjniles@mchsi.com.