HERMANN – The close-out public hearing for upgrades made this summer to three Gasconade County roads in the Owensville area was held recently, a formality in keeping with the conditions for using grant money to pay for the improvements.

Eva Voss of Meramec Regional Planning Commission (MRPC) and Paul Winkelmann of Howe Company, the county’s consulting engineering firm, met with the County Commission during its Aug. 27 session to review the work. There was no public comment offered during the hearing.

Upgrades were made to Old Highway 19, City Cemetery Road and Tappmeyer Road, all in the county’s Southern District and near Owensville. Funding for the work came through a Community Development Bloc Grant (CDBG). The contractor for the work was Capital Paving & Construction of Jefferson City.

Hard-surface overlays were applied to Old Highway 19 and City Cemetery Road while Tappmeyer Road received a chip-and-seal coating.

The work on Old 19 was done to rehabilitate the existing poor and aging pavement as a way to improve safety for motorists, as well as relieve county government from ongoing maintenance associated with pothole repairs and pavement patching.

The overlay applied to City Cemetery Road is aimed at the same goals of safety and avoiding future maintenance by the county.

The chip-and-seal coating of a section of Tappmeyer Road takes it from a gravel surface with a goal of improving air and water quality by eliminating dust during dry weather and water and gravel runoff during rainy periods.

The total budget for all three upgrades was $810,599 with the CDBG providing $529,210. The county provided a cash match of $106,726 and $172,663 worth of in-kind match, such as manpower and equipment to prepare the roads for the overlay applied by Capital Paving & Construction.

Meanwhile, the Commission again took up the matter of the time being needed by the Road Department crews to deal with damage to the county roads caused by bad weather that has struck the region throughout this year. Having to respond to that damage is continuing to delay regular road maintenance, causing extra hours of overtime to be accumulated.

“We are behind (on) grading overall,” noted Presiding Commissioner Tim Schulte, R-Hermann. “We’ve been fighting that all year. There are not enough hours in the day,” he said.

A lot of the extra hours are coming on the weekends, added Southern District Associate Commissioner Ron Hardecke, R-Owensville.

“I don’t know if there has been a weekend they haven’t been called out for trees on the road,” he said.

There seems to have been less road damage so far this year on the northern end of the county, but Northern District Associate Commissioner Jim Holland, R-Hermann, like Hardecke on the southern end, have found themselves cutting and moving trees off the roads as they come across them during their regular inspections of the road system.

Hardecke mentioned that some property owners also have helped clear roads near their properties. “

There are a lot of landowners who cut trees and take them off the road and we appreciated that,” he said.

On a related front, the Commission received several bids for gravel during its weekly session. Schulte earlier this year predicted that more creek gravel likely would be placed on county roads after it was evident that the crushed white rock might be more difficult to obtain for road surfaces. That’s because more white rock is being quarried and crushed for use at the sites of the two data centers being developed in Montgomery County. Those bids for gravel will be reviewed by Road Department officials, who will make a recommendation for a contract to the Commission. That could come as early as tomorrow’s session. The Commission did not meet last week.