Series On Dickinson County Courthouse Focuses On Engineer’s Office

(Spirit Lake)– This week’s installment in our series highlighting offices in the Dickinson county courthouse focuses on the Engineer’s Office. KUOO’s John Adams Sr. recently visited with County Engineer Dan Eckert…(click here for actuality.) “In the secondary road department we’re responsible for 660 miles of roads in the system. About 450 of that is gravel surfaced and approximately 200 miles are paved in the system. I have 15 staff members that take care of the maintenance on those roads…that would be the folks driving the snow plows and dumptrucks and the motorgraders in the summer blading the roads and stuff like that, so they handle the maintenance activities. We have 65 bridges in the county that we maintain as well and 91 drainage districts in the county.” What other services and jobs are handled by the Engineer’s Office? “Well I have a staff of five including myself and my office manager and three technicians that do all the designing, surveying, engineering of all the improvements we do on those 660 miles. This summer, for example, we’re going to replace two bridges in the county and do about four miles of pavement re-surfacing so that’s handled by my office staff. And then of course lots of the road records, road plans, we see lots of surveyors in and out of our office, lots of people that are seeking information about roads and right-of-ways and drainage tile and all the like.”