After months of public input and special meetings, the El Paso County Board of County Commissioners has made a decision regarding the intersection of Black Forest Road and Burgess Road.The county’s transportation department brought its first design to improve the intersection to the BOCC for final approval in April. The draft featured left-and-right-turn lanes in all four directions, creating an urban intersection in a community where residents want to remain rural.Over the summer, the first design became known as Alternative 1, as Black Forest residents scrambled to come up with a different design more in character with the area.The BOCC-approved design, known as modified Alternative 4, still has left-turn lanes in all directions and right-turn lanes from Black Forest Road to Burgess Road in both directions.One of the changes is the elimination of the right-turn lanes from Burgess Road to Black Forest Road.The design will allow for right turns – there just won’t be room for multiple cars to “stack up,” said Andre Brackin, county engineer.Brackin said the most recent traffic counts for right turns from Burgess Road are just below the point where stacking lanes are required, so the elimination of those right-turn lanes will not be a deviation from the design criteria.Commissioner Amy Lathen said she would rather build the stacking lanes now when costs are low than wait for future growth that could trigger higher construction costs.Both properties will probably be developed commercially, and that traffic will create a need for the stacking lanes, putting the burden on the property owners, Brackin said.Other than the right-turn lanes, alignment is the biggest difference between the design that was originally proposed and the BOCC-approved design.Brackin said Alternative 1 shifted the alignment of Burgess Road to the north so the right-of-way acquisition would take place on undeveloped land, sparing commercial land to the south.The modified Alternative 4 design approved by the BOCC does not realign Burgess Road, he said.Both designs require the relocation of utilities.Mountain View Electric Association is working on a design that could be overhead or underground – both costs are comparable, Brackin said.He said the $100,000 cost of moving MVEA’s facilities is included in the price tag of both designs.The natural gas pipe that runs through the intersection will also have to be moved, but the company that owns the pipe will pay for the relocation, said Judy von Ahlefeldt, chairman of the Black Forest Transportation Committee.Von Ahlefeldt recommended a different design with middle lanes instead of left-turn lanes, fewer signal lights and narrower ditches.She said since the signal was installed at the intersection in 2002, there have been 11 injury-related accidents and eight non-injury-related accidents.”We don’t think the numbers warrant such a big intersection,” von Ahlefeldt said. “This is not a high-volume, high-accident intersection, which is the way it was characterized when $500,000 was requested (for the design) in 2004.Brackin said von Ahlefeldt’s plan was an attempt to force all improvements into a 70-foot right-of-way, but it is too narrow to correct the intersection’s drainage problems.Phil Hosmer, member of the Black Forest Transportation Committee, said 53 percent of the 575 people who took a survey preferred a low-cost maintenance project to repair the road surface and drainage problems.Seven percent of respondents wanted to make the intersection a four-way stop, 35.5 percent were in favor of the left-turn lanes and 2 percent agreed with the original design (Alternative 1), Hosmer said.Brackin, Hosmer and von Ahlefeldt agreed on one change: reducing the speed limit from 45 mph to 35 mph on Burgess Road within a quarter-mile of the intersection. The change will match the speed limit on Burgess Road with the speed limit on Black Forest Road.”That’s probably a prudent thing to do, but it’s going to take quite a while to train traffic going through that intersection to adhere to a 35 mph posted limit,” Brackin said.With commissioners Dennis Hisey and Sallie Clark attending another meeting, commissioners Lathen, Peggy Littleton and Darryl Glenn voted 3-0 in favor of a modified Alternative 4.”I’m going to defer to our county engineer because he has to put his name on it,” Glenn said. “We have to be able to rely on him for that recommendation.””I don’t want to put an undue burden on a business; and, on the other hand, we don’t want to build (the right-turn stacking lanes) if we don’t need them,” Lathen said. “I will defer to the resident commissioner (Glenn) on this.”Brackin said at $1.7 million, the modified Alternative 4 will cost about $100,000 less than Alternative 1.
