By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDT
Hays Post
Ellis County public works crews will work to patch more than a dozen trouble spots along the southern portion of Ellis Avenue in the coming weeks while a final decision on the road will be left to a future commission.
Residents from the area south of Ellis once again approached the Ellis County Commission last week to discuss the future of a 5-mile stretch of Ellis Avenue after the commission delayed work on the road last month.
Public Works Director Brendan Mackay was tasked with presenting the commission with several options for the future of the road after the commission had previously approved changing the road from a hard surface asphalt road to a milled rock asphalt surfaced road.
Mackay presented the commission with four options for the 5-mile stretch of road.
The first was a to completely redo the road with hotmix asphalt for $5.6 million.
Mackay the county does not have the money to do that option. They would have to contract the work to an outside entity, because the county does not have the equipment for the job.
Option two was to fix the spots in the road that are in immediate need of repair. A Trego County farmer who uses the road to access nearby farm land said at the meeting last month they he wanted the county to fix the four or five “bad” spots.
Mackay said crews identified 14 spots of road in that stretch that need to be addressed.
The cost for material, but not including county employee labor, is estimated at $132,514, according to Mackay.
The county also does not have all of the material mixed at the moment and will have to dip into material set aside for next year to make enough to fix the road. They will also have to go out of state to Texas or Oklahoma to get the oil and pay to have APAC make the material.
Commission Chair Butch Schlyer asked Mackay if patching is just “Kicking the can down the road?”
Mackay said, “Yes.”
“When you do a patch like this, you want three to five years of life,” Mackay said. “I'm not willing to say we'll get three years out of it.”
Several times Tuesday, Mackay equated the road to a house.
“You keep patching the plaster, the drywall, but until you build that foundation up, you're just spending good money after bad,” Mackay said.
He said the two other options were a prime and seal and a coldmix repair.
The prime and seal would cost approximately $467,921 and a coldmix repair was estimated at $2.38 million.
County Administrator Darin Myers said the county has set aside a total of $250,000 for the project; $50,000 for the next five years.
Mackay recommended to the commission the original plan — mill the current asphalt surface, work it into the base and top the newly formed base with work rock into the milled surface.
He said that process would prevent moisture from getting into the surface from water, snow and freezing and thawing. It would also stop the moisture from the bottom in the form of springs that are causing some of the current issues with the roadway.
Mackay said that while it isn’t a hard surfaced road of asphalt or concrete, it's also not a dirt road.
The one option that Mackay said he would not go with was the patching of the trouble stops.
“It's not going to solve the issue,” Mackay said. “The base needs to be repaired.
“Even with that patching, where we'd do those patches, we
would nail rock into it,” he added. “Where do we start, where do we stop.”
A Rush County resident claimed the county had not maintained the road had been maintained in the last 15 years.
Mackay said the entire 5-mile stretch of that road was completely sealed was in 2015.
“And also asphalt patching has occurred every year except for the fall of last year and this year when we were directed to start operation to turn it from a paved road to an unpaved roadway,” Mackay said. “So it hasn’t been 15 years of neglect.”
Despite Mackay’s recommendation against patching the roadway, Schlyer and Commissioner Neal Younger elected to have county crews patch the trouble spots.
Schlyer said residents approached the commission requesting patching the road, so that’s the route he was in favor of going forward.
“If we patch, it kicks the can down the road to the next board of commissioners,” he said.
Younger said that he will be involved in that decision and, “I have no problem with that.”
“I would be supporting of Band-Aid it together and then when a new commission comes, we address it at that time,” Younger said.
Mackay said they do not have the material to make the cold mix to fix the trouble spots and he does not know if they will be able to get it this year. If they do, it will likely affect what they are able to do next year.
He also said they have other projects that are ready to begin in the coming weeks.
Mackay’s suggestion was to mill in rock in the trouble spots and level them out.
He said a lot of the problems with similar roads is that there was never a base built. They instead just used a prime and seal process over the existing road and never created a solid base.
“Milling the rock in would address the base issue, so we
would have a good solid foundation to build off of,” Mackay said. “Whether we
go back with asphalt or we use the millings and rock mixture on the top.”
Mackay added that 27 states said in a 2018 survey that roads that have fewer than 250 vehicles that travel it per day probably should not have been paved to begin with.
A 2018 survey of the road found that approximately 100 vehicles travel that stretch of road every day.
Mackay said they will attempt to begin working on the patchwork repairs at the end of October. A detour around the area will most likely be required, he said.