County News

By Roger Baker
County Manager

2/10/2005 - One of the items on Tuesday’s agenda for the Gilpin County Commissioners’ meeting was approval of our annual Highway Users Tax Fund (HUTF) report.

  This is something the Commissioners approve annually, though our Road & Bridge Director Earl Robinson and his staff actually prepare the report—and former Commissioner Ken Eye was very involved in the process as well.

  Basically, the report is a summary description by mileage segment of all the HUTF-eligible roads in Gilpin County, and the condition they are in. We then receive federal tax dollars—the money you pay in gasoline taxes, forwarded through the Colorado Department of Transportation—based on those figures.

  The County has about 150 miles of HUTF roads—300 lane miles is the way the feds look at it—for which we receive about $500,000 annually. That’s very helpful, and a large part of our Road & Bridge budget, so it’s worth going through the process.

  But one thing the report somewhat obscures is the two classifications of County roads. While all public roads in the County (other than the state highways) are County roads—for some we have title to the road rights-of-way, and others are over easements—not all County roads are maintained by the County. And that’s always a sore spot with the residents who live on those roads.

  The Commissioners and I get calls occasionally, and I’m sure Earl does too, from people wanting to know how to get their road reclassified as a County maintained road, so that it can be plowed in the winter. It’s a complicated process, and it’s been a long time since any new roads—even newly built ones, like those in the Paradise Valley subdivision—were added to the County inventory. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, though, and new Commissioners may look at the problem differently. But there are a lot of little roads in the mountains up here, and I’m sure we’ll never be able to maintain all of them, so this will continue to be one of those areas of concern with no easy solution.