Cambridge representative addresses Pleasant Plain Road conditions

FAIRFIELD – Jefferson County supervisors listened to complaints about the new chip and seal on Pleasant Plain Road from the county’s largest employer, Cambridge Investment Research, Inc.

Cambridge employs more than 900 associates, and is located on Pleasant Plain Road about 4 miles northeast of Fairfield. The company’s president of growth and development, Jeff Vivacqua, addressed the supervisors over Zoom Monday morning to express his displeasure at the quality of Pleasant Plain Road since it received a new chip and seal coat June 12-13.

“I feel like we have the worst road in the county right now,” Vivacqua told the supervisors and Jefferson County Engineer DeWayne Heintz, also present for the meeting. “And it’s probably not getting better for months.”

Vivacqua said he hoped the county would reconsider this approach to road repairs, and wanted to know how to establish better communication with the county. Earlier in the meeting, Vivacqua asked Heintz to paint a picture of how badly Pleasant Plain Road needed to be repaired in the first place.

“Did we have a deteriorating road? On a scale of one to 10, was it a two? Was it an eight?” Vivacqua asked.

“It was about a six,” Heintz responded. “The idea of preventive maintenance is that you apply the treatment before the road gets bad. You don’t want to wait until it gets like 110th [Street] did. You want to treat it before the pavement has failed, and help preserve that pavement structure.”

Heintz said chip and seals, a mixture of oil and rock, will become the new norm for repairing roads, and estimated that eventually all paved county roads will receive chip and seals.

“In the next 20 years, if our funding structure doesn’t change, our asphalt roads will all have a chip seal on them,” he said.

Pleasant Plain Road is classified as a “Farm to Market Road,” which makes it eligible for certain funds from the Iowa Department of Transportation. Vivacqua said the road merited a higher designation than that because of its high traffic volume.

“I feel that the traffic pattern we’ve created needs to be looked at differently,” he said. “It’s not ‘Farm to Market.’ It hasn’t been for a while, not with 900 associates.”

Heintz said Pleasant Plain Road averages 1,000 vehicles per day, which he said is “not a high traffic volume.”

“Most of our area service roads are 200 vehicles per day or less,” he said. “The only high-volume roads on the county system are the segments of Old 34, and those are in the 3,000-5,000 vehicles a day range. Pleasant Plain Road, Packwood Road, and Libertyville Road are all in the 800 to 1,200 vehicles per day range, and those are still not high volume roads.”

Referring to the problem of the sticky asphalt on Pleasant Plain Road in mid-June, Heintz said it was not the contractor’s fault.

“They did exactly what I asked them to,” he said. “In two out of the three roads that we did, it worked as expected.”

“So did we pick the wrong date for weather?” Vivacqua asked.

“Hindsight being 20/20, yep, we sure did,” Heintz said. “They offered to start on that one, and we had been working on putting rock on 110th, and we thought we were better off getting 110th weather-safe as opposed to having them work on Pleasant Plain Road. If we had them do [Pleasant Plain Road] first, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

Supervisor Lee Dimmitt said that, in a perfect world, the county could afford to put a fresh overlay on Pleasant Plain Road, but that’s not financially feasible. He noted that it cost $1 million to do a stretch of Pleasant Plain Road about 4 miles long in 2011, and today it would cost three times that much. He said the county’s road budget is only about $5 million per year, and depends on state and federal funds to do big projects.

Vivacqua wondered if the county was going to save money in the long run after accounting for all the maintenance it would have to do on its chip and seal roads. Heintz said the cost of a chip and seal is only one-tenth the cost of new asphalt, about $100,000 per mile for chip and seal compared to $1 million per mile for asphalt.

Vivacqua said he understood the county’s desire to save money, but nevertheless warned about the effects of underinvesting in roads.

“It’s decisions like that that could stop people in the future who want to come to work for us or any employer in the county, who will choose to live someplace else where they’re taking a different approach with their roads,” Vivacqua said. “We know we have a housing problem, now we have a road problem, and a restaurant problem. If we want to continue to be thriving, how do we look at these things in a better light and examine all options between $300,000 and $3 million and figure out if there was anything else we could do?”

After the meeting, Dimmitt said he was glad to see the county engineer take responsibility for the condition of the road instead of passing the blame on to anybody else. He said the public should understand the difficulty of maintaining 800 miles of roads in Jefferson County.

Supervisor Susie Drish said it’s important to remember how far Pleasant Plain Road has come, since it was a gravel road as recently as the 1960s. Supervisor Joe Ledger said that, in hindsight, it might have been wiser to shut down Pleasant Plain Road for a few days during the chip and seal application.

  Buy Photo

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

  Buy Photo

  Buy Photo