The Campbell County Road Department gave its annual report, highlighting its progress over the past year.
The road department is responsible for more than filling potholes and snow removal.
The department maintains roughly 300 lane miles of county roads and county bridges. It is responsible for the asphalt and concrete associated with those roads and the county’s bridges. The department also maintains vegetation on the sides of the streets, as well as drainage, pothole repairs, full-depth repairs, snow and ice removal, etc.
Campbell County Road Supervisor Luke Mantle gave the presentation at the June 5 Campbell County Fiscal Court meeting.
The county’s roadside mower cuts every roadside at least two or three times a season.
“We keep the vegetation off of the road, meaning if we can keep the shade off of the road, that asphalt surface will last years longer,” Mantle said.
The county has 124 bridges ranging from 3 feet to 65 feet, for which the road department is responsible. The county maintains six to 16 bridges annually, tuckpointing old stone abutments and removing vegetation. Mantle said some county streets have multiple bridges, like Rifle Range Road, which has five. It is one-way in and out, which he said can make bridge repairs tricky.
“So, if we work on one of those bridges, there’s a massive coordination of logistics and materials to get people in and out of that road,” Mantle said.
Engineers also inspect county bridges every other year.
The road department is responsible for maintaining the 1,389 cross culverts under its roads. A culvert is a structure that channels water past an obstacle. Mantle said they find issues weekly.
“What happens is the water pulls the material out of the bottom of the pipe, the bedding from the pipe, and that material keeps coming around the pipe, and you get sinkholes in the road,” Mantle said. “We typically do around 1,600 feet of cross culvert replacement a year in 20-foot increments. This year, we’ll be on track to do 1,800 feet in this fiscal year.”
Mantle said only one road in the county—Fausz—doesn’t have a culvert.
Mantle said the department’s main focus during day-to-day operations is keeping water off the road. The county sees a lot of slips, which the department can handle, some in-house and others contracted out.
In-house slips are handled with gabion baskets. A gabion basket is a type of wired basket filled with various rocks or soil that helps prevent erosion, retain a slope, or provide a landscape element. The department typically does over 1,000 linear feet of gabion baskets a year, Mantle said.
Another area the department deals with throughout its season is signs. The county has 680 signs and 595 posts, which cost $56,000. Because of that cost, Mantle said it’s important for them to know where the signs are and what they contain in case it disappears.
“They get stolen, run over,” Mantle said. “They fade out. They rot away. It’s funny how there’s a similarity between when school is out and how often we replace signs.”
The department is in charge of snow and ice removal in the winter. Mantle said that in a typical winter, they use 1,500 tons of salt, but in last year’s mild winter, they only used 450 tons.
The department uses a combination of solid and liquid deicers. They make brine in-house and pretreat the roads, which is called anti-icing. They also have a pre-wet system on all the new trucks; as salt is coming off, brine is sprayed to activate it. Mantle said the benefit is that they typically use between 15 and 20% less road salt, which puts fewer chemicals into the environment and saves the department money.
“That was one of the best, most thorough department reports I’ve seen,” Campbell County Commissioner Tom Lampe said. “Really well done. Thank you to your crew. You do a lot with that crew, and it is very visible to us and to our residents and community what a great job your department does. It’s very impressive.”
Campbell County Judge/Executive Steve Pendery said the road department crew is the county’s best foot forward.
“It’s not just the attention to detail on ordinary things,” he said. “It’s the sophistication that you all have developed over the years to tackle bigger and bigger, more expensive projects and save the public money on those things.”
