Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507100015
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV17 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But the surrounding rural countryside of Montgomery County holds dirt roads aplenty, some 125 miles altogether. About 100 miles of that qualifies for paving because of the traffic the roads carry, yet the state has money enough to cover just two miles a year.
Like dust rising behind a speeding pickup, the situation leaves a bad taste in many longtime residents' mouths.
Some have waited decades for their road to be paved. Others are more recent arrivals, but still share with their neighbors a sense of frustration.
County and state officials hear that sentiment in person at least every two years. That's when the state Transportation Department and the county hold a public hearing on the list of secondary-road system improvements for the following six years.
This year, the hearing has been moved up from its usual spot in the fall, to take advantage of a chance for federal funds to improve a railroad crossing. The county Board of Supervisors and state transportation engineers will take comments on the rural-road plan beginning at 7 p.m. Monday on the third floor of the Montgomery County Courthouse in Christiansburg.
If it goes anything like the 1993 hearing or a related hearing earlier this year, the supervisors will hear true-life stories of banged-up suspension systems, school buses that squeeze along winding, narrow passages and washouts following heavy downpours.
"I can't argue a lot with them," said Dan Brugh, the state's resident highway engineer based in Christiansburg. "Most of them, when they relate to the condition of the road, they're right."
Some of the comments will come from individuals fed up with years of collecting names for petitions, writing letters and speaking out to get a road's name - or keep that road's name - on the improvement plan.
Others, like William R. Holliday of Coal Bank Hollow Road, are more patient. The Electro-Tec Corp. retiree has attended these road hearings on and off for 19 years. His house sits just west of busy Mount Tabor Road outside Blacksburg.
"I don't know how many times we were No. 1" on the priority list, Holliday said. His concern is that Coal Bank Hollow stay on the list and keep moving up. Yet he's realistic about the long wait. "You can understand it," Holliday said. "There's not really that many people presently that live on this road."
While the slightly more than a quarter mile of Coal Bank Hollow Road is paved from U.S. 460 to an entrance to the densely populated Preston Forest subdivision at Pearman Road, the stretch of a mile and a quarter between there and Mount Tabor Road, which has only eight driveways, remains much as it was when the area was home to the M.C. Slusser Coal Co. and surrounding mining community.
Paving the section in front of his house is No. 3 on the proposed list of 23 secondary-system priorities for 1996-97 through 2001-02. The Board of Supervisors will have to approve the list, developed by one of its committees, before the ranking becomes official. The project is expected to cost $490,000 and be finished by the end of 1996. In 1991, the last time the state counted traffic there, 170 cars a day used the stretch, well above the 50-a-day standard used as a benchmark for paving.
Montgomery's rural-road quandary comes down to limited state resources to improve secondary roads, pitted against continued growth in formerly isolated, rural areas. The growth in new homes and residents brings more traffic, which in turn takes its toll on the rural roads. Some need to be scraped and graded up to 10 times a year, compared with two or three times for a typical rural road, Brugh said.
In dollars and cents, the state will spend approximately $1.9 million on Montgomery's secondary system improvements, including widening the two-lane stretch of busy Prices Fork Road from the Blacksburg town limits to Prices Fork, in the fiscal year that began last week. Of that, $573,000 will be spent on unpaved roads. At a paving cost of approximately $300,000 per mile, that will take care of just about two miles. The money comes from gasoline taxes, the vehicle titling tax and 0.5 percent of the state's 4.5 percent sales tax.
"The funding that we get in Montgomery County just is not going to address what needs to be done," Brugh said. Like state school money, Virginia's highway funding formula is weighted to favor population, and thus Northern Virginia, Richmond and Tidewater benefit. Fairfax County, with a population of 880,700, has a secondary road improvement budget of $27.28 million in this fiscal year.
In the New River Valley, Montgomery, population 75,600, gets the most money for secondary system improvements, but it also has the most roads that qualify for paving because of heavy use. While Montgomery, Pulaski and Giles counties each have 125 to 150 miles of unpaved roads, only 30 miles in Pulaski and less than 10 miles in Giles have traffic counts of greater than 100 cars a day. Montgomery has 100 such miles to go before its biennial public hearing on roads takes a focus away from paving.
"We're going to be working on these for a long, long time," Brugh said. "The end is not in sight."
by CNB