County looks to resume steady maintenance of gravel roads

The Yuma County Board of Supervisors heard a plan and gave provisional approval to get the county’s gravel roads back on a regular maintenance schedule Monday.

Officials said the regular grading and maintenance of the county’s gravel roads ended in about 2013, after a post-recession reduction in public works employees through attrition finally made it impossible to regularly attend to those roads, which can turn into washboards or potholes after a rainstorm or even a trip by a heavy piece of ag equipment pulls rocks back into the roadway.

Yuma County has a total of 270 miles of gravel roads, about 200 miles of which are expected to get regular maintenance, plus 42 miles of “primitive” and dirt roads that are maintained approximately once a year.

The proposed “baselevel” maintenance schedule for county-maintained gravel roads includes a grading cycle where roads would get some attention every 60 to 75 days, with more extensive “recap and shape” work done every five years. This would be tried out next fiscal year, which begins July 1, at an estimated cost of $436,000.

Much of the funding for this maintenance will come out of savings to be created by contracting chip-sealing work on the county’s paved roads out to the private sector, which also frees up staff to do the gravel road work.

Even so, total expenses will be about $112,000 above the base funding provided to the program through saving elsewhere, so the remainder will have to come out of the General Fund or elsewhere.

The maintenance and financial results of the program will be reported to officials on a quarterly basis over the course of the year, Deputy County Administrator Paul Melcher said.

Deputy Public Works Director Jason Phipps said grading and other maintenance of gravel roads hasn’t totally stopped, but tends to get done on an “emergency” basis,” something the regular work schedule is designed to prevent.

The county would use five existing street crews on a revolving basis to handle the new responsibilities. Phipps said when the department’s staffing was at its height of about 87, it wasn’t difficult to take care of the gravel roads, but with the 67 available positions the department has now, it could be a struggle, even if all those jobs are filled.

“We are right now filling seven equipment operator positions to get us to 67. I’m not even at 67 today,” he said. Positions in the east county are particularly hard to fill, since most applicants live in the west and don’t want to take on a long commute to and from work.

A stepped-up maintenance plan also floated by county staff would have instituted a 45- to 55-day grading cycle and the more involved “shaping” done every four years, at a cost of $988,000. But they recommended starting with the base level, and the board agreed.

Some members began to head in different directions on what they’d like to happen with these gravel streets. District 2 Supervisor Russell McCloud asked whether the schedule could be pared back to grading once every six months, given that the current quality of the county’s roads is rated at an average of 71 out of 100 on the Overall Condition Index (OCI) scale.

“I don’t understand why we don’t just do it on a sixmonth cycle. If we haven’t done them for four years, doing them once every six months would greatly lower the cost, and would be a whole lot more maintenance than they had,” he said. “Why so frequent?”

Both staff and other board members said the number of complaints they’ve been getting about road conditions show citizens wanting a bigger boost in the number of maintenance runs on all kinds of roads. Board Chairman Tony Reyes said he wouldn’t look forward to explaining to constituents that the road they’re concerned about wouldn’t be tackled for another half a year.

“Six months is a long time, in politics that’s an eternity,” he said.

Reyes asked whether there is a concerted plan to start paving more of the gravel roads, since grading and re-grading them “is a never-ending job.”

“There are some examples out there, like between Avenue A and Avenue B, where there’s just half a road and then there’s another half a road that isn’t paved. So you end up doing maintenance on half of a paved road, and the other half is gravel road,” he said. “Do we have a plan to go forth and maybe take on some of the most heavily traveled roads and see if we can get away from just doing maintenance on gravel roads?”

Phipps said there isn’t one now but there could be a discussion later on, perhaps plugging more of them into the county’s Capital Improvement Plan. This didn’t completely satisfy Reyes, who said that can result in putting off solutions for issues everyone is well aware of now.

Yuma County’s full Road Improvement Plan is due for a vote at the board’s next meeting April 17.

The board was also given an update on economic development activities in the county, including prioritized sectors of manufacturing to attract and development a policy for offering incentives for companies looking to move to the area.

Melcher said the main avenue available to the county for incentives is reimbursement of developers for building public infrastructure, such as roads or flood control basins. He said companies would need to take a series of steps to pursue the incentives, including an independent analysis of the economic benefit their project would bring to the county.

“The real key to this is the economic benefit analysis, because it’s one thing for the developer ... to state that this is going to occur, it’s another to have an independent company verify the results of their initial statements,” he said.

In other action Monday, the board:

• Held a public hearing on the Yuma County Housing Department’s fiscal 2017 public housing annual plan, capital fund 5-year action plan and fiscal 2017 capital fund.

• Authorized the housing department to sign an agreement with Housing Authority of the City of Yuma for the county to provide housing quality standards inspections and rent reasonableness determination for HACY’s planned 58unit Mesa Heights Apartments. Inspections are projected to begin in July 2018.

• Recommended state approval of an application for a liquor license for Del Pueblo Birreria, 2015 W. 8th St., Yuma.