Crawford County Commissioners on Friday received an engineering report on what has been worrisome road in the northern part of the county.

The recently-completed report, from Triad Environmental Services in Pittsburg and dated Aug. 20, details what would probably be necessary to pave a seven-mile stretch of 680^th Avenue between U.S. Hwy. 69 and Kansas Hwy. 7, and slightly more than a mile of 200^th Street to provide better access to Bone Creek Lake. The bottom line, commissioners agreed, is it’s just too expensive to consider the project right now.

The discussion started in late June, based on a request from Kevin Shaffer of Arma. Shaffer, who sponsors regular fishing contests at Bone Creek Lake, said anglers from around the area and as far away as Kansas City are reluctant to bring their expensive fishing boats to the lake because of the potential for damage from gravel flying from the surface of the road.

The report studied two options to make a hard surface for the road: Applying a double-layer of chip-and-seal to the existing road bed and constructing a full asphalt roadway. Cost estimates for just the road construction ranged from $1.7 million to $2.6 million.

“I thought that was quite interesting,” Commissioner Tom Moody said. “that’s a far cry form the $40,000 or $50,000 we kept hearing.”

The Commissioners instructed county employees to do a traffic count on the roads, which were noted in the report. The average daily counts were 200 vehicles a day traveling west from Hwy. 69 and about 100 cars per day headed east off of Hwy. 7. About 110 vehicles per day were counted, traveling north on 200^th Street into Bone Creek Lake.

“That 200 cars a day sounds like a lot, but it’s not a lot,” Commissioner Tom Moody said. “We have roads with 1,000 or more cars a day on them and we have to focus on those roads.”

The costs of upgrades to the roads, the report further stated, were based on site visits and on bid estimates from the Kansas Department of Transportation and other local companies from other projects. The estimates were made before recent increases in the price of the oil used to make asphalt and as a base for the chip-and-seal process, so the actual costs of any project could be greater.

Further, the report didn’t detail other items that would probably have to be included in any surfacing project, such as culver conditions, vertical alignments and slope conditions. It did note, however, that 680^th Street has been designated a Federal Aid Secondary (FAS) road. That means, while federal highway dollars could be used to help defer cost of improvements, those improvements would have to comply with detailed specifications from KDOT.

Also, there are two bridges on the road that would have to be upgraded, if not completely rebuilt, to meet requirements.

And that would mean even more expense. The cost of any needed bridge work was not included in the report, Board Chairman Bob Kmiec said.

“There could be federal money for ‘whatever type of improvements that are deemed necessary,’” said Jim Metcalfe, KDOT district construction and materials engineer at the district office in Chanute. “But, with federal dollars, there are strings attached.”

The current condition of the road bed could necessitate a complete reconstruction to bring it in to compliance with state and federal highway standards, he said. While that would make a very nice road, it could also increase the final cost of the project to several million dollars.

“There will be design criteria that have to be met,” Metcalfe said. “A $2 million project could become a $10 million project”

The final cost of the project could be paid, if all the criteria are met under the FAS road program, at an 80-20 split. Federal dollars would pay for 80 percent of the cost with the county responsible for the remaining 20 percent.

That doesn’t decrease the amount that would have to come from county coffers. And Kmiec said the county just doesn’t have the money right now to be able to afford that kind of an expense.

In an ideal world, every road in the county would be a hard-surface road, Kmiec said. But that’s just not feasible, either, he said.

Any project on the 680^th Avenue/200^th Street corridors would have to be planned for the future, Kmiec said. The county would have to start setting aside funds to complete a project there. He didn’t rule out the possibility but, taking into account the time it would take for design, route surveys and other pre-construction requirements, any project in the area could still be years in the future.

His fellow commissioners agreed.

“It isn’t like we don’t want to do the road,” Commissioner Ralph McGeorge said Friday. “Every commissioner in here would like to do the road. But it’s just out of the realm for us to afford it.”