Residents Point Finger at Commissioner over Road Woes

BLUFF CITY, Tenn. – Karla Toler remembers the spring of 2007 in three ways.

It was that spring when she and her husband went to Michigan on vacation and when the couple finally decided to pave the driveway in front of their house near the corner of Stanfield Road and Old Elizabethton Highway.

It also was the spring when the Sullivan County Highway Department finished widening a part of Stanfield Road that runs right by their house.

Today, you can’t tell from looking at that section of road that it was just two years ago that it was widened and paved.

Deep cracks crisscross the road’s surface, giving it what county Highway Commissioner Allen Pope said is a texture akin to “alligator skin.”

Its uneven surface rises and sinks several times as it heads toward the Tolers’ side of the street, where one final ripple threatens to drop chunks of two-year-old asphalt into a drainage ditch that runs along the edge of their property.

“It seems like [the road’s] been breaking down,” Toler said. “It was about a year ago that the road started showing [such wear and tear].”

And it was about a year ago, she said, that a group of logging trucks began making three to four trips each day past her house before they turned on to Old Elizabethton Road.

Those logging trucks belong to Volunteer Logging and Excavating, a Bluff City business co-owned by County Commissioner Dwight King of Piney Flats.

And those trucks have created some problems for King, especially since he and 12 other commissioners cast votes last month that killed a plan that would have given the highway department $500,000 for paving county roads.

Recent anonymous calls to the highway department and posts made to this and other area newspaper Web sites, demand that King repay the county the amount of money it takes to repair the damaged road.

Pope and other highway officials are taking these complaints seriously and said they’d like to work out a deal with King to fix Stanfield Road, even though they also admit bad timing more than anything else is to blame for the damage.

King said if he’s responsible for the damage, he’ll happily comply with the residents’ wishes. But he also said the situation is nothing more than “straight politics” stirred up by people who want to divide the commission.

Stanfield Road

Stanfield Road cuts a 0.9-mile-long swath between some farmland and a few homes due southeast of downtown Bluff City as it connects Timber Ridge Road with the Old Elizabethton Highway.

When the highway department built the road in the 1970s, Pope said, it had a design flaw that created almost 40 years of headaches for both highway officials and the people living on Toler’s side of the street.

The original Stanfield Road was 20 feet wide, or wide enough for two cars traveling in the opposite direction, until it reached a point about 1,000 feet east of the Old Elizabethton Highway intersection. After this point, the road was only 12 feet wide and barely wide enough for one car to traverse at a time.

“It was just one of the many one-lane roads in this county,” Pope said.

Five families, including the Tolers, bought land on this one-lane portion of Stanfield Road and started building homes, he said. It was about this time that the highway department started getting calls about the road’s condition.

Pope said a lot of these people said they were tired of pulling off to the side of the road or backing up when a car came in the opposite direction.

Stanfield Road residents also were worried about what might happen to inexperienced drivers who didn’t know how or where the road ended and who might run off the road
at night, he said.

Pope said at that time the county wanted to improve Stanfield Road but couldn’t because highway officials couldn’t convince landowners to give up the front edges of their property as right-of-way needed for the road widening.

But that changed in August 2006, when Pope was elected highway commissioner and King won his seat on the County Commission. Using personal relationships both men had with one of the landowners, Pope and King said they were able to get the right-of-way needed.

The county secured this land by giving the family enough money to build a fence along the side of their property, Pope said. Construction on the road-widening project started in the fall of 2006, he said.

“We’re the ones who got the road in there in the first place,” King said. “Now people are saying I’m the one that’s been tearing it up.”

Bad timing

There are three phases to a county road-building project after highway officials design it and secure the rights-of-way, Pope said. Highway crews first dig out a road bed and lay down enough rock and gravel to provide the pavement’s surface with a solid and level foundation.

They then spread a layer of asphalt and tar on top of the road bed that’s known as a binder coat and is 2 inches thick. Once this coat sets in, crews put down a surface coat that’s 1 to 1.5 inches thick.

Pope said county highway crews usually don’t put down a road’s surface coat until a year after they’ve put down the binder so they can see if the road bed has any soft or trouble spots as it undergoes normal wear and tear.

Highway crews put down the second lane’s rock and gravel road bed in the fall of 2006 and finished putting down the project’s binder coat in the spring of 2007. The road bed and binder coat involved $6,000 worth of asphalt and $6,000 to $8,000 worth of labor from 15 highway workers, Pope said.

But before the county could put down the surface coat and finish the project, King and Volunteer Logging started logging 15 acres of wooded land on a piece of property on Stanfield Road about 1.5 miles east of Old Elizabethton Highway.

King said his company worked on the project for about a month from March to April in 2008.

Each day during that period, Volunteer’s trucks carried four 80,000-pound loads of timber down Stanfield Road to mills in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, he said.

King said a logging truck can weigh about 130,000 pounds when it is fully loaded. The state has no laws barring a truck of this size from traveling down a street like Stanfield Road and his company had no way of knowing about the road’s weak or incomplete condition until it was too late, he said.

“I’ve worked in probably 100 miles of this area and I’ve never torn any roads up,” King said.

He added that Volunteer’s trucks haven’t been down the road since they finished the job last spring and there’s evidence other trucks have used the road since his company finished the job.

“The problem is that there wasn’t enough asphalt put down [on that part of Stanfield Road]. If it had been completed the way it should have been, there never would have been a problem,” King said.

Pope also said the road’s condition had a lot to do with its damage. Except for two trouble spots at the top of the hill that highway officials are blaming on a leaking water main, Pope said Stanfield Road’s only problems exist where the highway department left off its second coat of pavement.

The bottom part of the road also suffered some drainage problems, Pope said, which the highway department fixed.

“If there’s a bad place like that on a road, a truck will find it,” Pope said. “In a way, this is a blessing in disguise because it showed us where a bad place was at.”

Straight politics

Stanfield Road residents started complaining about their street’s deteriorating condition before Chistmas, said David Campbell, a section foreman with the highway department.

Those complaints picked up quickly after the March 16 County Commission meeting, when Pope and County Commissioner John McKamey of Piney Flats made a plea to get more money for the highway department’s paving operations. At the meeting, Pope said he would have to suspend all county paving operations until the next fiscal year because he had spent almost all of the money in his department’s paving fund earlier in the year.

When Pope finished his plea, McKamey asked commissioners to take $500,000 out of the county’s reserve accounts and put it in the highway department’s paving fund.
The commission’s Budget Committee, of which King is a member, took that amount of money out of the paving fund when the county’s budget was approved in September, McKamey said.

Despite the arguments, 13 of the county’s 24 commissioners, including King, voted down McKamey’s proposal. At one point, King accused McKamey of grandstanding at the March meeting.

“Why was [McKamey’s request] brought out as a motion on the floor instead of going through the committees like a normal budget resolution?” King asked last week. “Let’s talk about this stuff before we do it.”

McKamey, contacted by phone Friday, refused to comment about the Stanfield Road issue, saying he must continue to work with King and doesn’t want to get involved.

King’s stance on the paving issue has drawn a lot of criticism from several of McKamey’s allies, who have been writing letters to newspapers, posting comments on Web sites and calling the highway department to make something that happened a year ago an issue today.

“To be honest with you, I didn’t know anything about [the Stanfield Road situation] until I heard all of these complaints,” Pope said, adding that his office has been paying close attention to the paving fund debate since it started.

Pope said he hopes the department and King’s company can come up with a solution to Stanfield Road’s problems that satisfies the needs and desires of everyone involved, including the street’s families and the taxpayers.

Part of that solution may involve having King’s company pay the county back for whatever money it spends to repair the road, which would involve digging out a 20-foot by 30-foot section of road and laying down new asphalt.

Pope said paving supplies for this project could cost $1,200, but he won’t be sure about a total price until the weather clears and his crews can study it further.

“I’ll try to work with them and solve the problem,” King said. “I’ll work with the county, whatever we need to do. ... if I’m the only one who caused the problem.”

But while King’s willing to work with the highway department, he said something else is behind the issue other than damaged pavement and 80,000-pound logging trucks that haven’t been down the street for a year.

“It’s just straight politics,” King said, summing up the controversy. “Some people, they just try to play the politics and get one group of commissioners against the others.”

gmclean@bristolnews.com | (276) 645-2518