Archuleta County Public Works Director Mike Torres appeared at a special Board of County Commissioners meeting, early Monday morning, to present a proposed contract document.
The contract is related to an asphalt overlay project on a portion of North Pagosa Boulevard, and a short stretch of Navajo Trail.
A short-term fix to a long-term problem. Or so I’m given to understand.
Here’s the drawing that illustrates, in yellow, the segments of roadway that will get a temporary fix. (Why “temporary”? We’ll consider that in a moment.)
At the lower right corner we see the intersection of North Pagosa Boulevard and Highway 160, with gas stations on either side of North Pagosa. The project continues north to just past the entrance to Victor’s Sushi Restaurant, formerly Pagosa Brewing. The project also includes a few hundred feet of Navajo Trail — an especially bad section of pavement, these days — ending just past the Cowboy Car Wash.
At the bottom of the drawing, we see some black lines indicating a future building surrounded by parking slots… with entrances coming off of Navajo Trail. I’m not sure why this future building is indicated in the drawing. The worst part of Navajo Trail pavement is located right about where the northwest entrance to this future building would be located.
Monday’s special BOCC meeting lasted all of 4 minutes. It took one minute recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and another minute to approve the 80-page ‘resurfacing’ contract with Four Corners Materials.
The resurfacing work was actually authorized at the April 2 BOCC meeting. The Monday agenda item was to approve the ‘contract’, included in the meeting packet as what appeared to be a ‘template’ — without any of the blanks filled in, and without a specific dollar amount included for the actual paving. For example:
None of the three commissioners had questions about the 80-page contract.
The BOCC has indicated, in past discussions, dissatisfaction with certain previous road project contracts that seemed to lack full protections for the County government. Perhaps this new contract template addresses those concerns. But if so, none of the improvements to the contract were discussed on Monday.
The bid previously approved for this project — $487,325 from Four Corners Materials — was not the lowest bid on this project.
A company called PAP LLC had bid $304,915 for this resurfacing… but at the April 2 BOCC meeting, Public Works Director Mike Torres had stated that the County had experienced “some issues with them in the past” and that he recommended instead selecting the second lowest bidder, Four Corners Materials, which, he said, has a history of successfully completing projects for the County.
Two other bids had come in even higher than the Four Corners’ bid: Sunland Asphalt at $564,457 and Elam Construction at $655,158.
Following the approval of the (partly blank) contract at the April 22 special meeting, the BOCC approved a change to the price of the new Transit Facility now under construction at Harman Park. The price increase is related to some type of chemical process, to remove rock where the building foundation will be located.
According to the explanation offered by County Manager Derek Woodman, the ‘geotech’ analysis of the project site had failed to reveal the need for $35,000 worth of rock removal.
Mr. Woodman:
“The geotech was all completed. They knew there was rock. They had hoped it was deeper than what it turned out to be. ..”
Apparently, the building contractor “kind of just scraped the surface, and the rock was right there. It was basically a flat pan that was virtually right where the building is going to sit.”
As a friend of mine once said, “hope” is not a great strategy.
Mr. Woodman:
“So the discussion of whether to blast it or to use this chemical process. Blasting would require a minimum of four foot depth. This would go only 18 inches deep, so it’s much more cost effective to do this chemical process.”
The cost increase was approved.
But let’s get back the the resurfacing of North Pagosa Boulevard. I found this portion of the 80-page contract to be interesting.
17. SUBSURFACE CONDITIONS
17.1. The CONTRACTOR shall promptly, and before such conditions are disturbed, except in the event of an emergency, notify the OWNER by WRITTEN NOTICE of:
17.1.1. Subsurface or latent physical conditions at the site differing materially from those indicated in the CONTRACT DOCUMENTS; or
17.1.2.Unknown physical conditions at the site, of an unusual nature, differing materially from those ordinarily encountered and generally recognized as inherent in WORK of the character provided for in the CONTRACT DOCUMENTS.
17.2. The OWNER shall promptly investigate the conditions, and if he finds that such conditions do so materially differ and cause an increase or decrease in the cost of, or in the time required for, performance of the WORK, an equitable adjustment shall be made and the CONTRACT DOCUMENTS shall be modified by a CHANGE ORDER…
For many years now, our two local governments — the Town and the County — have been in discussions with the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) about the safety issues at the intersection of North Pagosa and Highway 160. The properties on the west side of North Pagosa Boulevard were annexed into the Town about 30 years ago; the properties on the east side are still in the unincorporated county.
While North Pagosa is a County road, it connects to a private road (Country Center Drive) and a busy Town street (Village Drive) and various County roads, plus a state-owned highway.
The surrounding subdivisions and road system were developed back in the days of the Wild West (the 1970s and 1980s) when this area of Pagosa had almost zero traffic, and the roads functioned passably. But with the arrival of dozens of businesses now accessed from North Pagosa Boulevard, and this the quadrupling of the county’s population, the folks concerned with traffic safety have determined that something pretty drastic ought to be done with this complex collection of intersections.
“Something drastic” can be interpreted as “something very expensive”.
Who has that kind of money?
CDOT doesn’t. It is currently trying to do a highway reconstruction project through downtown Pagosa, and has been allotted $19 million for that project. The latest reports indicate they will need to find even more money to fully fund that downtown project.
The BOCC is struggling just to find $487,000 for a temporary resurfacing on North Pagosa Boulevard.
The Town Council seems more interested in purchasing vacant $850,000 parcels for which they have no clearly defined use.
Maybe a temporary fix is all we can expect.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.