Road maintenance cost

By Larry Martin

About two weeks ago we had a monsoon storm one night that was the worst of the season.  It rained most of the night and as a result the roads in Southwest Rio Rico had many dips and washes full of rocks and debris.  As my wife and I headed for Tucson early the next morning, we saw the County had already sent a backhoe out to the Caralampi wash and was clearing the road along Caralampi.  When we got home that afternoon, Caralampi was cleaned up, but Paseo Reforma still had many places full of rocks and one place with a tree stump washed into the middle of the road.  The next morning we called the County Public Works and reported the unsafe road conditions and the dispatcher said that a school bus driver had already reported the same places on Paseo Reforma and they would get right on it.  Three days went by with nothing done, so we called again and were promised they would take care of it.  During this 3 day period there was a County road grader working on Providencia and a frontend loader clearing Revolucion, both of which are not far from Paseo Reforma.  A couple days later they came and cleared the stump and rocks that we reported, but drove over two other places with rocks and debris and just left them in the road.  About a week later they came out and cleared the other two worst places, but there are still a couple spots with rocks and dirt washed out in the traffic lane.  Maybe they will finally get Paseo Reforma cleaned up on the next pass through.  May I suggest that if the County didn't send a piece of equipment out to the same section of road 4 or 5 times to do a couple hours work that could be done in one trip, that maybe they could save enough money that they wouldn't have to abandon the sections of road in Rio Rico.  Sometimes, it's not how much money you have in your budget, but how efficiently  you spend that money.  Operating inefficiently while figuring out ways to shirk responcibility by abandoning road maintenance is just not sound policy.