Virtually every head of beef cattle going to the Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas feedyards and markets goes over U.S. Highway 50.
Uncompahgre Valley Farmers who sell produce to national markets take their goods over the famous old route.
Gunnison and Montrose hospitals and medical communities depend on the highway to move critically ill and injured patients. Closing it down for even an hour could present a life or death situation.
Montrose Forest Products hauls about 40 truckloads of timber a day over Highway 50.
The Arrowhead Mountain Lodge community has but a single artery connecting it to the rest of the world — that would be Highway 50.
Between 300 and 400 trucks (single and double unit) haul goods over the highway every day.
There are an average of 350 to 450 local and tourist-laden vehicles per day that cover the miles between here and Gunnison.
To say the least, this 60-mile stretch of the U.S. Highway system is the aorta of the Colorado Western Slope. Cut it in either direction and something, or perhaps somebody, dies.
As of now, however, that is the plan the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) intends to carry out. The plan for a road improvement, referred to on drawings and documents as “US 50 Little Blue Canyon Project,” calls for closing down the highway for 19 hours every work day, allowing one-way at a time travel during three, two hour windows each day. The schedule could be in place for as many as two years.
The project has been on the drawing boards for a long time. Time enough for the US Department of Transportation to ante up $20 million (to be matched by Colorado) for the project which is considered an important safety enhancing work. Yet, Western Slope residents have only heard about details, such as losing their main east-west link, as recently as this past summer.
“I am surprised at how quiet Montrose (city and county) and CDOT have been on this project,” District 6 Colorado Senator Don Coram said this week.
Had it not been for Coram and District 58 Representative Marc Catlin, folks in Montrose County would not have had any say at all in their scheduled surgery.
A constituent from Western Colorado told this reporter that they told the executive director of CDOT, Shoshana Lew, that we needed to have some public meetings on the matter. Her response was that they didn’t do public meetings. She said they are not positive.
Because they deemed the matter a major economic setback for their districts, Coram and Catlin organized a public meeting on their own and staged it at the County Event Center in September. Over a hundred west slope environs showed up and took the invited CDOT crew to task, some in quite strong terms. It was obvious to observers that CDOT had not entertained the idea that western Colorado people would take such a dim view of their plan.
After the September meeting, Coram kept up the pressure. He exchanged text messages with Governor Jared Polis, in which he laid out the concerns of the Montrose and Gunnison area population. Polis agreed to a huddle with Coram and others regarding the problem of essentially shutting down U.S. Highway 50.
“I told the governor that we were not trying to kill the project,” Coram said. “But we certainly have to come up with some better solutions to the traffic situation.” Coram said the governor shared his concern. So, Polis kicked the ball upstairs.
On October 8, Polis and his CDOT administrator, Lew signed a letter to the USDOT Director Elaine Chao and Federal Highway Administrator Nicole Nason. The letter was a plea from Polis for the Feds to help Colorado deal with the problems brought on by closing the highway.
In the opening paragraph, Polis admonished the national agencies that there are issues.
“Given that the project is a technically challenging one, we will need the contractor whom the FHA selects to work cooperatively with the state to minimize closures,” Polis said.
According to Coram, the job of scheduling closures and managing traffic passage through the construction zone belongs to the contractor. That factor and the resistance to the 19-hour per day closures creates staffing and operational problems for the contractor.
“No matter who is bidding on the project,” Coram says, “this is going to push costs of the project past the $40 million mark.”
For example, it has been suggested that more of the work be done at night, when full closure would be less disruptive. The USDOT said it has evaluated that move and determined it to be cost prohibitive. They also cited worker safety issues. Although the Polis team says that they believe the work can be done safely, they did not offer any examples of their thinking.
The Polis letter to USDOT also suggested that communication between the contractor and the local community is an important matter. “We need creativity and partnership from all sides,” Polis said.
Long on saying what we need and short on offering concrete solutions, the letter leaves the ball laying in the Fed’s court.
The closure schedule is still set to begin next April. According to Coram, the bid letting on the project, handled by the USDOT and FHA, is eminent. So far, CDOT seems not to be looking at any alternatives, save some that are only slightly more appealing than the closures. An email to CDOT engineers on Monday generated no response.
“CDOT said truckers could reroute to I-70, or they could go to Delta and up to Crawford and then over 92,” said the senator.
The 92 route would bring the traffic back to 50 at the Blue Mesa Dam, several miles east of the construction zone. But, besides the obvious expense, adding the extra miles, 200 on the I-70 route, most truckers will get caught by USDOT regulations calling for 11 or 12 hours driving time and then 10 with the engine shutdown.
“If a trucker gets caught in one of the one-way windows and his time is up, his company could shut the rig down right there,” Coram said. At the least, haulers will have to build their schedules around the closures, which means downtime somewhere else and a longer more costly haul.
There is another question that remains unanswered and is very much a concern of the Montrose and Gunnison businesses communities.
“I don’t think anybody planning this project ever thought of the economic impact of this project,” Coram said. “Not just what it costs to do it, but what it is going to cost Montrose and Gunnison in terms of lost business revenues.”
Several speakers at the town hall in September also suggested that lives could be at stake, because the highway is the only link for ground transportation for medical patients from accident scenes or residences in the area.
The Arrowhead Mountain Lodge, with its relatively new owner, Patrick Amie and growing year-round community will be isolated for a minimum of 19 hours every day. Amie, not a pessimist, told the gathering he would not survive the shutdown.
Coram said that minimally the scheduling could be adjusted to make the one-way periods longer and he suggests that more nighttime work could be done.
The Polis letter to the Feds did suggest that performance bonuses might be used to force the contractors to take measures that would give more consideration to the highway being more available.
