The Dec. 29 Guest Commentary, “Clarification on county roads,” by George Gerstle, Boulder County transportation director, was a rewrite of what he has been saying for months/years! His “commentary” regurgitated the county party-line: “We have done the best we can with the money we have, it is the subdivision property owners who benefit from road maintenance so they should pay and the county has not done a good job of communicating its policies.”
At other times the transportation director will state that it is the county’s responsibility to maintain roads and then he begs-off in getting the work done by saying, “if funds are available we will do the work.”
Gerstle stated in his commentary that letter-writers made several misstatements so I think it is appropriate for me to point out his misstatements and engineering errors.
1) To begin Gerstle refers to the Local Improvement District as a repaving plan when in fact it is a destroy-and-rebuild plan. The LID plan calls for ripping out the majority of the streets and rebuilding them at a cost of $48 million. This is 67 percent of the $ 72 million LID total cost.
2) Gerstle’s statement that they have done the best they can with the money they have implies that they have taken action to maintain the quality of our streets when in fact they have resurfaced none (0 miles) since 2010 and before.
3) If, over the past 5 years, the county had budgeted $300,000/year they could have saved 50 miles of streets — one-third (33 percent) of our streets from needing costly resurfacing or reconstruction. It is a well-known engineering fact that early treatment prevents costly future repairs.
4) The statement that the county does not have money from the general budget to maintain subdivision streets belies the fact that they have now committed to spending $1 million/year for the next 15 years as the county’s share of the LID cost.
5) Gerstle failed to make known that for $1million/year the county can chip & seal 15-miles of streets and overlay four miles each year. At this rate most streets can be resurfaced in 5-8 years without a LID and the streets will be in “good” condition.
I suggest that we support the legal action that is under way to stop the costly LID that has been imposed on us.
Darwyn Herbst
