During its regular meeting held on Tuesday, May 19, the Archuleta County Board of County Commissioners (BoCC) unanimously approved an agreement with Coral Construction Company to repair eight guardrails throughout the county at a cost not to exceed $85,550.
This includes repairs to four guardrails located on County Road 700, two on County Road 600 (Piedra Road) and two on County Road 119 (Light Plant Road), according to the agreement.
At a work session earlier that day, Archuleta County Public Works Director Mike Torres provided information on the project, explaining that the county has done “a lot” of work with Coral Construction in the past.
“They’re pretty much the only contractor in our area that does this sort of work,” Torres said, explaining that the mobilization cost for companies on the Front Range would make the project more expensive.
He noted the agreement price includes traffic control and material mobilization into Pagosa Springs.
“It’s a lot of guardrails, so they’re going to have to truck all of that material in,” Torres said.
In response to a question from Commissioner John Ranson, Torres explained that this project was included in the budget for this year, but that it exceeds the department’s budget and they will likely have to do a budget transfer line to cover the project.
“We weren’t anticipating a couple of these guardrails,” Torres said, explaining the county was able to get restitution payments last year for damaged guardrails.
He mentioned that the county has had issues getting some information about damaged guardrails from responding agencies, or if the culprit “just drives off” and doesn’t report the incident.
“That is the case in some of these,” he said, noting the county was able to get roughly $20,000 in restitution.
Commissioner Veronica Medina asked if the county could send a notice to law enforcement agencies asking for their assistance on these incidents.
“Obviously there’s nothing we can do if they hit and drive away … but if law enforcement responds to it, that would be helpful if they would notify us so that way we could seek restitution,” Medina said, adding, “It’s really important.”
Road and Bridge Manager Eric McRae explained that issues have been “ironed out and it should be smoother moving forward with receiving the information on crashes.”
McRae also noted that sometimes the county simply does not know about the incidents and it is taking about two to three months to get information on incidents from the district attorney.
Commissioner Warren Brown commented, “[Archuleta County] should be listed as the property owner, if not the victim, in these crashes that come out, and we should theoretically be kept in the loop, but that doesn’t always happen.”
clayton@pagosasun.com
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