Residents address concerns regarding Ridge Road/260th Street area
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During the public comment period of Wednesday morning's Marshall County Board of Supervisors meeting, a pair of citizens asked the board to consider improvements to the 260th Street/Ridge Road intersection just south of Marshalltown and just east of Highway 14, citing safety concerns.
Mark Wyant, who lives in the area, explained that a repair was completed last year but said it was dangerous because there's over a foot of drop on the east side.
"It sucks everything down into the ditch, and then on 260th, it's developed a huge rut more on the north than on the south side," Wyant said. "I was told when we started this that the maintainer does a pass and a half approach to doing the grading of the road, which means he comes down the road on alternating sides if it's the north or the south side on 260th, grades that to the middle and then grades the middle to one side. That's not working. It's leaving a pile on one side of the road, but it's allowing the ruts. The ruts that are forming are getting too deep."
He called it a "slump hole" up towards the top of the hill and remembered helping to push a vehicle out of the ditch after a mother and her children went into it. Board Chairman Jarret Heil agreed with Wyant and said the road could be "a little tricky," especially in the winter time.
Harlan Helgren, who lives across the street from Wyant, also stepped forward and shared his own safety concerns about the condition of the road.
"The road is not graded properly or shaped properly because the water does not get into the ditch, and it creates a huge ravine on the north side and the south side of that road and that area," he said. "I ended up having to take my car in to get a realignment done because of that rut. I have to cross off the road very, very slowly to my driveway, and the crown of the hill behind me is so sharp. Somebody's gonna get hit... The line of sight is very, very poor."
He worried that if someone went off the road by six inches, they would experience a four to five foot drop, and he believes someone will get hurt if it isn't regraded. Helgren asked for signs or guardrails as a precautionary measure.
"My wife and I like living here. We just moved here in December. We like the community. We like the neighborhood, but we're just concerned about that road," he said. "Because somebody's gonna get hurt. It's gonna happen."
County Engineer Paul Geilenfeldt told the supervisors that while the road grading situation there isn't necessarily unique within Marshall County, it is the only one in the midst of a residential area.
"The road is not fit for a residential area, but the real problem we have there is drainage. If we can get the drainage to behave, it can be made safer and better, but the biggest thing we have there is we need to acquire additional right-of-way and regrade that entire intersection," Geilenfeldt said. "There's not a fix that's gonna work in that current right-of-way."
He added that Wyant has been cooperative about the possibility of acquiring said right-of-way, but he has not yet spoken to other landowners in the area about the matter. Geilenfeldt said fixing the ditches would go a long way toward addressing the problem.
"If you have a ditch, you don't have, basically, water running down the road causing that rut that you're talking about, and I've seen it. It gets deep, and it gets deep fast," he said.
According to Geilenfeldt, there have been conversations about paving the road, but such an action would require voluntary assessments.
"I don't think you're gonna like the assessment number as far as what it takes to get pavement to that roadway," he said. "It would be something where maybe we'd have to talk about a cost share... We can do something, but it's gonna take some right-of-way to make a repair that actually sticks."
He didn't think a guardrail would be effective because there's not enough ground to back it up and keep it from falling into the ditch.
"There's things we can do. It's just gonna take some money and some time," Geilenfeldt said.
Because the item was not on the agenda, the board could not take formal action, but Chairman Jarret Heil directed Geilenfeldt to explore the cost of acquiring right-of-way and regrading the road.
"I think that's the simplest thing to start there versus a paving (project)," Heil said.
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Contact Robert Maharry at 641-753-6611 ext. 255 or rmaharry@timesrepublican.com.