KINGWOOD — Preston County commissioners talked with State Division of Highways (DOH) officials for nearly two hours Tuesday about roads.
Topics ranged from lack of personnel to the DOH practice of reclaiming roads.
In the end, Deputy State Highways Engineer of Operations Darby Clayton said he walked away with the impression that, “I’m taking away that we’ve done a lot of good, we’ve got a lot more things to do, we’re going to continue to work together to make Preston County better.”
“I just feel like there‘s some things we could do a little bit better,” Commission President Samantha stone said.
She questioned the practice of reclaiming roads.
Reclaiming, according to DOH workers in the meeting, begins with taking the road down to the bottom of potholes. Then stone is added. A grader crowns the road so it drains properly, and a roller compacts the stone. Ditching and mowing are done before reclamation.
It’s unfair to people who bought homes along tar and chip roads that are now being reclaimed to gravel roads, Stone said, and the reclamation isn’t always well done.
“Is that the way the roads are going to be maintained here in Preston County?” she asked. “Is that our fate to reclaim all these secondary roads? Or are we looking for reclaiming for now and getting them back to tar and chip?”
“We’ve been very clear about this whole process of what we are doing and how we were looking at reclaiming,” Clayton said. “Making them so we can maintain them, go back to tar and chip on the ones we can go back to tar and chip on.”
“We don’t have to reclaim them. We can just not fix them” and tell people county commissioners said not to, Clayton said. “We’re not turning anything back to dirt. We’re turning them to gravel. If we can’t maintain them,” because of lack of manpower and money, it’s easier to maintain gravel than tar and chip roads, he said.
“Some of these road it happened to, I was just shocked,” Stone said. Can we have input on this, she asked? Commissioners requested a list of roads that will be reclaimed and those to be returned to tar and chip.
Preston County is funded for 52 DOH personnel. It has 39, and sometimes personnel are “borrowed” from other counties, Preston County Supervisor Blain Bowmar said. But there won’t be a blitz of large numbers being brought to Preston County like last summer, Clayton said.
And two to four people are off each day in the summer, Bowmar said.
“Thirty-nine can’t do Preston County,” Commissioner Dave Price said.
He suggested recruiting young people who don’t need the income for a family of four. Once they’ve worked in the system a few years, they may see the benefits of staying with the DOH, he said.
We’ve done job fairs, we’ve sped up the hiring process, but we can’t speed up the certification process that lets workers move up the ladder and get better pay, and we can’t match salaries of private business, the DOH said.
“Any help you could provide … with ideas to help us, in Preston County, the jobs are there,” Clayton said.
TWEET@DominionPostWV
