The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Keeping good roads good
By Alissa Johnson
The Mt. Crested Butte Town Council gathered information about developing a road maintenance plan at its June 16 meeting. Jerry Burgess from SGM, an engineering, consulting and surveying firm, presented a possible capital improvement plan as a starting point for maintaining and repairing Mt. Crested Butte roads. No formal plan will be developed, however, until the town establishes a budget.
Burgess explained that a road capital improvement plan is created by conducting an inventory of roads, assessing and rating their condition, identifying the deficiencies and then creating a strategy to bring them up to an acceptable condition within budget.
“I use the term strategy because any capital improvement plan can be implemented any number of different ways,” Burgess said. To prepare the suggested strategy for Mt. Crested Butte, SGM conducted a survey of roads in the town and used a variety of factors like cracking, surface deformation, and settling to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being new roads. Mt. Crested Butte roads averaged 6.6.
According to Burgess, the proposed strategy focused on maintaining good roads first to prevent them from deteriorating further, and building up the funds for reclamation of severely damaged roads over the next three to four years.
“I think making a focus on cyclic maintenance and keeping good roads good may be a little more important than your bad roads. The bad roads will need maintenance no matter what, whether that’s now or five years from now,” Burgess said.
While that might frustrate some constituents, Burgess added, the strategy would be more mindful of protecting investments. Repairing a road that required slurry seal versus a more significant type of repair would require less funding. Burgess outlined a five-year plan that included an annual budget of $350,000 and emphasized maintenance projects like chip seals and fog seals in year one.
That approach brought the total expenditure for year one to $234,000, allowing the unused budget to be rolled over to the next year.
“Next year, [year two] is the same scenario,” Burgess said. “Then in year three and four, you start having enough money for full depth reclamation.”
For high-profile roads like Gothic, Burgess recommended working in sections with the goal of bringing the quality up to par with the section in front of Mountaineer Square. “That’s a strategy worth a discussion at a work session,” he told the council.
Burgess emphasized that the overall plan was “a way to get you to an end result, which is that all the roads in Mt. Crested Butte are in good condition.”
Councilmember Gary Keiser wanted to know what one of the more degraded roads would be like without immediate maintenance. “Assuming year one is 2015, and we do Peakview Drive, what would it be like five years from now? If we didn’t do anything until five years from now, would it be all crumbling and falling apart?” he asked.
“It’s certainly not going to get any better,” Burgess said. “The traffic on those roads is thankfully relatively light, given where they are at. If traffic was heavier it would fall apart really fast.”
“But since it’s a dynamic plan we could re-do it every year,” Keiser said.
“That’s exactly right,” Burgess said. “It’s a tool that needs to be maintained.”
Councilmember Danny D’Aquila asked, “Does it make sense that if the projects aren’t going away we look into our own chip seal system?”
“For 18.5 miles of road, I personally don’t think so, because of the maintenance of equipment, staff training, and storing the asphalt and oil chips. If you were Gunnison County, the state or a bigger community, I might think so,” Burgess responded.
Mayor David Clayton asked staff what kind of work would be possible in 2015, given that it was June. Town manager Joe Fitzpatrick responded that would require more discussion.
“The biggest thing holding us off was that we were hoping to have a number for the rec path project and work backward. We need to sit down and do more analysis to see where we want to go,” he said, adding that availability of equipment might be an issue too,” he said.
“I’m not sure there’s going to be a machine anywhere near here right now for full reclamation,” Fitzpatrick continued.
Fitzpatrick and town staff want to coordinate road maintenance with the county, where possible. Once the cost of the rec path, and as a result, the amount of available funding is clear, a timeline will be established for developing a road maintenance plan.
