(Spirit Lake)– The Dickinson County Board of Supervisors today (Tues.) set this coming September 21st as the date for a bid letting on a project to widen the shoulders on a stretch of County Road A-34 east of Milford. County Engineer Dan Eckert says it involves a three mile stretch from 230th Avenue east to County Road M-56…
“Traffic is high enough on that now that we have to do engineering standards to flatten the slopes and extend the culverts, essentially go from two and-a-half to one fore slope to a four-to-one, the idea being that if an errant vehicle would run off the road it wouldn’t flip over at a four-to-one.”
The bid letting will be conducted by the Iowa Department of Transportation. Eckert says the project will be funded through the county’s Farm to Market account.
Eckert also informed the supervisors once again about two major road projects in the county that he says are quickly moving up in priority, including County Road M-56 north of County Road A-34…
“That one I reported to you at budget time I still think is like a five-year $10 million job because we’ll have to buy right-of-way one year, extend the culverts, reconstruct the pavement. That’s a concern to me because I don’t know if that pavement’s got five years left in it. A big, big, project. That and N-14 are the two big, N-14, the same thing with the shoulders: they’re too steep, the shoulders are too narrow and the fore slopes are too steep. They’re two-to-one still. Traffic has exceeded a thousand by a long ways on that and so when we do anything with N-14 we’re going to have to start addressing the fore slopes too, so.”
Eckert said County Road N-14 north of Terril will also soon need to be reconstructed. He says the county was recently denied federal funding for that project…
“The numbers were all there, but it’s my opinion the reason we we got denied is because we just recently got two great big funding sources on A-34 in Milford next year and then M-27 into Lake Park, and the other eight county engineers looked at me and kind of said aren’t you kind of robbing the pot the last couple of years, and denied us funding on N-14. So at this point, yes, we don’t have any federal funding for either N-14 or A-34 and next fall we’ll apply again but again that’s out to 2025, so the earliest we’re looking at getting any federal funds for either one of those would be 2025.”
Eckert says the existing pavement on County Road N-14 between Terril and Highway 9 is 36-years-old and is nearing its life expectancy. He says some culverts are also starting to fail under the road.
