Mancos meeting set on highway reconstruction

Mancos meeting set on highway reconstruction

Jan. 6, 2001

By Tom Vaughan
Mancos Times Editor

Twelve Mancos businesses, in a letter to Mancos Mayor Greg Rath, have called for the town board to get Bayfield’s input on dealing with the Colorado Department of Transportation with regard to intersection reconstruction.

As a result, Bayfield resident Carol Short will describe and discuss her CDOT experiences with the Mancos Town Board, Mancos business people and interested citizens at the regularly scheduled town-board meeting on Wednesday, Jan. 10.

The meeting starts at 7 p.m. and the CDOT discussion will be the first item of "old business," so the topic should be broached early in the evening.

CDOT is working on redesigning the dangerous intersection in Mancos of U.S. Highway 160 and Colorado Highway 184, the site of several fatalities in past years.

Short, who is attending the Mancos meeting as a private citizen, has been on the Bayfield town board for 2 1/2 years and is currently Bayfield’s mayor pro tem.

Reached Thursday by phone, Short said she will describe the experiences the people of Bayfield have gone through (and are still in the midst of) since CDOT announced intentions to redesign the 160 bypass at Bayfield.

As with Mancos, Highway 160 was moved north of the center of Bayfield over 40 years ago. The "bypass," with its adjacent frontage roads, attracted businesses until it became a second business district, one with growing traffic congestion.

CDOT began to offer Bayfield its ideas of what to do with 160. People across the board in Bayfield were "underwhelmed," she said. The chamber of commerce sponsored a petition to the governor on the principle, as Short put it, that "what you need to do is make a big stink in Denver."

Proof of that precept came in May, when CDOT offered alternatives to the town’s citizens on a Tuesday evening. The news of the Bayfield petition to the governor was on the front page of Wednesday’s Durango Herald, and new options were forthcoming from CDOT by Wednesday evening.

That set off a seven-month process of negotiated settlement, in which representatives of each identified interest group met 12 times in what Short called a "mediated, facilitated public process." Though the written agreements that came out of this lengthy process were signed off on by CDOT and others, there were still obstacles encountered, Short said, as they got down to the specifics of engineering.

Now the Bayfield project includes a project review team, still representing the various interest groups, which meets monthly to keep the project on track. Construction is still at least a year away, and cost overruns have complicated the task.

A further complication came in November 1999, when the Transportation Commission of Colorado changed the designation of U.S. 160 in Bayfield, Mancos, Durango and other locations in southwest Colorado to "expressway."

The impact, according to Short, affects "only access, not speed limits," emphasizing unhindered movement of traffic along U.S. 160, shooting people right through small towns. She said four communities along 160 protested the redesignation; none were successful.

Several Mancos business owners contacted Friday said they thought the expressway designation was a serious mistake and should be undone. In their opinion, the current CDOT plan, which provides for as many as three stoplights in addition to the one at the 160/184 intersection, implies eventual abandonment of the expressway designation anyway.

Lyle Cox, owner of Cox Conoco, said, "We have to get the expressway designation changed first."

Both Pete Loyd, owner of P&D Grocery, and Cox thought lower speed limits would contribute to highway and intersection safety more than redesign of the roadway.

"If they’d control the speed, I don’t think there’s that much of a problem," was Cox’s opinion, echoed by Loyd: "We’ve done 75-80 percent of what we can do."

Both thought lowering the speed to 35 mph would help still more, while noting that no design could possibly eliminate all accidents.

JoAnn Riffel, chef/manager of the Millwood Junction Restaurant, favors a stoplight, but wants to see U.S. 160 have two lanes each way with turnoffs. With the turnoffs, she said, "they don’t have to slow it down."

Dolores, Del Norte and U.S. 160 entering Durango from the west work that way, she pointed out, with the traffic flowing at 45 mph.

Riffel emphasized the need for Mancos Valley residents to attend the Wednesday evening meeting and get involved.

"We need to bring the community together," she said, because the proposed changes will affect all of Mancos, not just the highway businesses.

Mancos Town Administrator Tom Glover, in announcing the meeting, said, "I am hoping that the result will be some kind of consensus on this draft plan so that we can move forward with the next step. I would like to see a safe intersection and I would like to see a thriving business community. I think we can have both."