Making Road Maintenance a One-and-Six Year Program

The operating problem

Ouray County’s 2026 road plan states that roughly 90% of its road system is unpaved. Winter weather, spring runoff and summer monsoons compress construction into a narrow season while creating competing repair needs. With limited staff, equipment and funding, the department had to balance daily service, long-lived pavement assets, drainage, high-country access and emergency response.

In the field

Photographs from Ty Barger’s Ouray County collection show some of the terrain and conditions behind these planning choices. They illustrate the work environment; they are not documentation of the particular completed-work entries below.

Photographs: Ty Barger.

Ty Barger’s planning system

As Road & Bridge Superintendent, Ty submitted the plans that appear on the County’s public road-plan page. The documents identify a detailed first-year work program and a more illustrative six-year horizon. They pair a summary of proposed projects with a report of previous-year road improvements, maps, dust-control scheduling and winter-maintenance priorities. The 2025 plan and 2026 plan bear the superintendent’s T. L. Barger signature.

The core preservation concept was to apply corrective and preventive treatments across the hard-surfaced network within a repeating six-year cycle. Crack sealing, patching, mastic repairs, chip sealing and fog sealing were sequenced to delay more expensive resurfacing or reconstruction when feasible. The plan explicitly gives the preservation cycle priority when a limited budget prevents all proposed work.

What the published records show

• 2022 CR 1 gravel reconstruction: A County report for September 2022 records 1.8 miles rebuilt north of Snow Bush Drive using 3,800 tons of gravel, 1.3 miles regraded from Wisteria Drive to Snow Bush Drive, and stabilization applied across 3.1 miles from Wisteria Drive north to the chip seal. These treatments cover overlapping parts of the corridor; their mileages must not be summed as separate rebuilt road.
• 2024 completed-work example: The 2025 plan’s prior-year report lists a 2.33-mile segment of County Road 1 (Canyon Point to Ponderosa Drive) with asphalt patching, mastic repairs, chip seal and fog seal, each accompanied by completion dates in July–September 2024. This is a documented example of layered corrective and preventive work on one segment, not a claim about every County road.
• 2025 recorded-work examples: The 2026 plan’s previous-year improvements report lists a 3.00-mile gravel build-up on County Road 24, segment 100, and a 1.47-mile build-up on County Road 24D. The same report lists a 2.22-mile County Road 1 segment with crack sealing, patching, mastic repairs, chip seal and fog seal. These entries record the plan’s reported previous-year work; they are distinct from projects in its future schedule.
• 2025 pavement sequence: The report covering August 2025 work records patching on CR 1 and CR 24A, mastic repairs completed by August 14, chip seal on August 18–19, and a CR 1 centerline rumble strip on August 28. The report covering September 2025 work records fog seal on September 3 and pavement markings on September 9. The reports describe a work sequence across several segments, not a single combined mileage.
• 2026 budget tradeoffs: The 2026 plan says gravel crushing would not be contracted that year, dust-control product application would be reduced by half relative to prior seasons, and after-hours service on medium-priority winter routes could not always be provided. Publishing those constraints made the effects of funding limits explicit rather than implying the full program could proceed unchanged.

Why the approach matters

A road plan is useful when a resident, employee or commissioner can trace a decision from a service need to a route, treatment, approximate cost and funding constraint. The publicly posted plans distinguish completed work from proposed work and show how an annual budget interacts with a longer preservation cycle. This transparency is a practical management outcome in its own right.

The plans also show their limits. A listed future project is a proposal subject to funding, weather, emergencies and subsequent revisions; a reported treatment is evidence of work, not proof that pavement life was extended by a measured number of years. A condition survey, life-cycle cost analysis or later outcome report would be needed to quantify those effects.