In August, the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners took a bus tour of county projects. One focus of the annual “Work Session on Wheels” included a tour of the eastern plains and Falcon.Andre Brackin, head of the county’s transportation department, led the tour. He addressed a number of issues in the area.Brackin said the work funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to correct drainage problems on Highway 24, west of Judge Orr Road, is complete except for fencing. The project successfully dried up groundwater that was flooding three basements in the area, Brackin said.The installation of culverts to correct drainage problems that closed Judge Orr Road between Highway 24 and Eastonville Road this spring is also complete, but it’s a temporary fix, he said.The county would like to replace the culverts with a bridge, but if funding delays the bridge, the new culverts are designed to last 25 to 50 years, Brackin said.The detention pond on the south side of the Safeway shopping center is the next problem Brackin would like to fix.The pond doesn’t function properly because it’s always full of groundwater, so a constant flow of water from the pond has cut a channel that flows under Highway 24 south to Falcon Highway, he said.”The pond is owned and maintained by the Woodmen Hills [Metropolitan] District, but based on our coordination with the district, I’d like to make changes to that outlet structure and decrease the volume and damage downstream,” Brackin said.Meridian Road between Woodmen Road and Stapleton Road is due for some attention, too.The old two-lane Meridian Road was turned into the southbound lanes when the northbound lanes were completed in 2005, said Jennifer Irvine, a project manager for the transportation department. The project to upgrade the southbound lanes of Meridian Road has already been awarded, and work is scheduled to start after Labor Day, Irvine said.As the tour bus headed east toward Calhan, Craig Dossey, project manager for the county’s development services department, said the BOCC approved the planned unit development for 4-Way Ranch in July.”Development services is also reviewing an application for a zoning conceptual plan that includes Big R to expand commercial [development] in that area,” Dossey said. “Primarily, the purpose is to legitimize some of the illegal uses occurring on that same site.”The department is also reviewing Two Star Station and Silver Star – two PUDs in the same area. “This means this area of the Highway 24 corridor could develop as a commercial node,” he said.Dossey also reviewed plans for a power transmission line along the north side of Highway 24 from the Clipper Windpower wind farm, which has been proposed for the hills east of Calhan, to Mountain View Electric Association’s substation in Falcon.The transmission line would run close to the Rock Island Trail and require approval from the county’s parks advisory board, which has scheduled a public meeting for Sept. 9.Discussions about the wind farm are preliminary, and Clipper Windpower has not yet submitted any applications to the county, Dossey said.The wind farm itself will require multiple special uses that must be reviewed by development services.A few miles east of Calhan, the bus turned south on Harrisville Road to view the area proposed for the wind farm.Dossey said the wind farm might include up to 100 wind towers, each 425-feet tall when a blade is positioned at the top. The towers would be located between Calhan Highway and Ramah Highway and south of Highway 24 and north of Judge Orr Road.If Clipper Windpower submits applications, Dossey said they will be evaluated for visual impacts and impacts on the county’s road system.The tour also visited Berridge Bridge, a wooden bridge built in the 1930s that’s one of five bridges in the county with a sufficiency rating of less than 50. The rating means the bridge is structurally obsolete, Brackin said.The county has obtained $750,000 in federal funds to replace the bridge, but Brackin said the bridge can be replaced with a box culvert for $450,000.On Oilwell Road, Max Birnbaum from the county’s transportation department said the department is using a new approach for maintaining the county’s 1,000 miles of gravel roads. Instead of trying to do more miles with less material, they’re applying 6 inches of gravel to about 20 miles of road each year.Birnbaum said the county is using a new technique called “asphalt blade patching” on roads with lots of potholes.”It’s effective when there’s poor pavement condition and potholes are grouped together over a short stretch,” he said. “We dump the asphalt out of the back end of a dump truck and grade it.”Sometimes, they also chip seal a road that’s been asphalt blade patched.The technique saves the county time and money. Total cost of materials for six miles was $30,000, Birnbaum said.Next, the bus bounced along South Calhan Highway – an eight-mile section of road scheduled to be completely rebuilt.”You never want to let a paved road get to this point,” Brackin said.”If you overlay a road every six years, it’s a lot cheaper than rebuilding it entirely,” he said.In the eastern part of the county, the transportation department faces logistical problems in delivering hot mix asphalt and keeping it at the right temperature, Brackin said.The tour returned to Colorado Springs along Highway 94.At Ellicott Highway, Dossey said the planning commission had just approved the Big Valley sketch plan, consisting of 19 acres of neighborhood commercial development and 188 acres of single-family residential development.The plan is likely to go to the BOCC for approval in September, he said.
