County road master plan nears completion

Garland County will soon have a master plan regulating the construction and maintenance of county roads and adjacent ditches, County Judge Rick Davis and Road Commissioner Jerry Lampo said.

Davis said the plan, which should be completed by late summer or early fall, will define which roads in the county are “arterials, collectors and just regular, standard county roads.”

“It’s just specifications of what the roads should be, widths, rights of ways, how they’re to be constructed,” Davis said. “It’s an upgrading of our road standards. I think you’ll see a version of it in the next 60 to 90 days.”

Davis said the Hot Springs Area Metropolitan Planning Organization is assisting the county in developing the plan.

Lampo said the master plan “will let us get ahead in preparing these roads and the ditches, replacing culverts and making sure

all that stuff’s in good shape before we seal it.”

“In theory, we won’t have to go back and repair as much and the seal will last longer. In years past you’d go in there and clip the shoulders back and seal it,” he said.

Lampo said that without cleaning out ditches adjacent to roads “water stands there and it will weep underneath the road and make some soft spots.”

“Then you have potholes and the road comes all apart,” he said.

Lampo said keeping roadside ditches cleaned out has been complicated over the years by utility lines placed underground in the ditches.

“It used to be that you could take a grader and stick the blade in a ditch and run on down the road, peel everything out, scoop it up, pick it up and you’re done,” Lampo said. “Now gas lines, phone lines, water lines, everything are in the ditches and it really makes it difficult to maintain them.”

He said the county “is just trying to get some of these roads in better shape so there’s less maintenance.”

Lampo and Davis said some of the county road standards still in effect are outdated.

“Nowadays, they’re more picky about the size of gravel,” Lampo said. “In years past, they didn’t have the machinery to work in a gravel pit and get the right sized gravel. They just pushed up with a bulldozer and hauled what they could get and tried to build a road with it.”

Lampo said that as a result, there are gravel rocks the size of footballs in some county roads, which make the roads difficult to maintain.

“You have anything from 1- inch to 12- inch rock in there that you’re trying to deal with,” he said. “The grader operators try to weed them out, but they get covered over with gravel and then as traffic hits that rock after you seal the road it will scoot. The next thing you know you have a pothole there.”

Davis said some of the county road specifications are 35 years old. He said the implementation of new road standards is “something we needed to have done a long time ago.”

“They’re not even using the same type materials that they were back then.”

Davis said county road and subdivision standards “all go together.”

“If you want to build a subdivision that has 50- ft. lots then there should be a different standard on how you build your road, because it affects the maintenance of it,” he said.

“You can’t have open ditches and driveway culverts every 50 feet, it just makes a maintenance nightmare.”