In an effort to address what Kane County Officials have consistently called “a public health and safety hazard,” the county has constructed a culvert over a frequent flood site and traffic bottleneck along House Rock Valley Road, toward the Wave and Coyote Buttes.
Photos courtesy of Kane County Commission.
According to Kane County Sheriff Tracy Glover, who also manages buildings and grounds and coordinates local Search and Rescue, “As a matter of public safety, I’ve been trying to get this culvert done for years. We’ve seen a large increase in travel along that road, with the increase of visitor traffic to the Wave, White Pocket, Coyote Buttes … we’ve had a lot of flooding and it has become a public safety issue. Through the summer, we’re out there for one reason or another at least once a week if not multiple times a week. My biggest concern, and the reason I’ve been aggressive about this project is how frequently we have to get an ambulance down to wire pass and that crossing. We had to work through some court hearings to make sure we had the right to install the culvert - the judge essentially said we have vested title in the road which allows maintenance, and that’s what allowed us to move forward in the construction of the culvert.”
According to County Roads officials, as they already had the concrete forms and other equipment prepared in case of an opportunity such as the one presented with this judge’s ruling, “It was relatively inexpensive for us to do it … we self-performed the labor on the project, so we could do it pretty inexpensively.” The primary construction took about two days to finish. According to County Roads Coordinator Bert Harris, “We have the road open again, we will put some more road base on it and clean it up a bit more. We plan to plant native seeds in the temporarily disturbed areas - we used a dozer to put tracks in the disturbed areas so when we spread seeds in those areas, they stay put.”
The installation of this culvert is complicated by the ongoing legal debate between Kane County and the Federal Bureau of Land Management. Rights over who has rights to maintain and develop which roads is a hotly contested issue with the RS2477 legal conflict. Sheriff Glover stated, “The BLM has tried to stop us from putting that culvert in … The government was pretty much protesting the project throughout, which is disappointing; we would’ve preferred to work with them. I appreciate the Commission’s leadership on moving forward; it was a group effort on an important project.”
County Officials offered further statements on the more subjective politics of the installation of the culvert and its greater significance in the ongoing legal debates, which will be discussed in further detail, along with statements from BLM, in a SUN report in the near future.
