2024 Erik Dickson on Dust Abatement for Lindbergh Lake County RD

From: Erik Dickson <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date: Mon, Apr 8, 2024 at 12:32 PM
Subject: RE: Dust Abatement for Lindbergh Lake County Road.
To: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Cc: Shane Stack <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>, Cory Miller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>, Kris Blank <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>, Joseph Miller <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>, Shawn Ladue <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

 Good afternoon Mr. Cory.  I’d have to defer to our Road Maintenance Supervisors on the condition of the road and whether or not that would make it a consideration for including it with our program.  However, based on previous requests from residents to include Lindbergh Lake Road and a few other roads in the Condon area in our program, they’ve never risen to the point of consideration based on maintenance prevention.  And, please keep in mind that we get this same request from residents in about every area of the county for the same reason about road conditions. These are gravel roads in rural areas, and we sometimes have to accept that we cannot keep them in the best condition year-round.   

The roads that we treat now county-wide are what we’ve determined to be our bare minimum need since we started our program in 2005.  Our budget has fluctuated from about $80,000 that first year to a high of nearly $280,000 in 2011-2013.  Through those years of varying budget, the cost per mile has gone from about $2,500 to an estimated $4,600 this year.  With all other material prices and overhead costs similarly rising every year, our budget has been relatively stagnant, so we make tough choices about which maintenance activities we cut back to a base level, and our dust abatement program is one of them.  We’ve purchased equipment to make our program as efficient as possible and have cut application rates to minimize our annual budget.  The $140,000 target this year is about as low as we can go and cannot not absorb another $16,000 to add a new road.

 As far as the idea of alternating which roads get treated each year, we’ve tried that before and it doesn’t work well.  Even with roads that we’ve treated annually for several years and expect good performance from residual effects if we skip a year, they didn’t perform as well as hoped.  We’d essentially have to stop treating an equivalent 3.6 miles elsewhere to get several years of residual material established in Lindbergh Lake Road before we could consider an alternating schedule.  At that point we’d be going backward in the condition of those other roads and would have to catch up in the future by skipping more than a year on Lindbergh Lake Road.  That would just turn into a poor performance cycle for all roads considered, so we choose to annually treat the base list that we’ve established over nearly 20 years of experience.

 I realize this isn’t the answer you’d like to see, but it’s the reality of our situation.  Please feel free to send us any future questions or requests.


Erik K. Dickson, P.E.
County Engineer / Assistant Director
Public Works Department 406.258.3772 
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