A median project on Camino del Rio between Eighth Street and 14th Street in Durango has some business owners upset that it will block access to their establishments. Meanwhile, Durango City Council is asking for better communication with the highway department.
Construction on the $5 million median project began last week. When finished, the medians will block direct access to a number of businesses for drivers turning from Camino del Rio, according to business owners.
Dorman McShan, owner of Precision Imports, a car dealership in the 1000 block of Camino del Rio, said he will lose accessibility from northbound traffic wanting to turn left.
“I’ve had a left turn into my business for almost 50 years,” McShan said.
The new center-lane medians will be constructed from Eighth Street to Ninth Street, from Ninth Street to the new Holiday Inn, from Natural Grocers to 12th Street and from 12th Street to 14th Street (or the junction at Camino del Rio and Main Avenue).
The project also includes upgrades to the traffic signal at Ninth Street and Camino del Rio, and improving the HAWK crosswalk at 12th Street and Camino del Rio, said Lisa Schwantes, spokeswoman with the Colorado Department of Transportation. The upgrades to the HAWK crosswalk won’t change how the intersection functions; it will only add new support posts to the existing signals, Schwantes said.
CDOT and the city began working on the project as part of an “action control plan” devised by the two government entities between 2008 and 2010.
“The point of access control plans is to coordinate, and work together to make a safe highway that goes along businesses in cities, as a lot of our highways do,” said Jennifer Allison, traffic and safety program manager with CDOT.
CDOT tries to communicate with stakeholders, she said.
“Our highways run through towns, and it’s very important that we as CDOT try to get in front of the project and try to tell the owners what’s going on as often as we can,” Allison said.
The construction has caused slowdowns for traffic along the busy highway corridor.
“If you must drive through the work zone, we are instructing drivers to use the zipper merge configuration,” Allison said. “Drivers should use both lanes all the way to the merge point at the work zone. This traffic pattern, also known as a ‘zipper or late merge,’ allows for smoother, more efficient merging, less stop-and-go traffic, quicker travel times through the work zone and decreased chances of rear-end collisions.”
Those who use Camino del Rio on their daily commute will bear the brunt of the construction congestion, as work is planned to take place from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Overnight work was not permitted for the construction because the city and CDOT say noise associated with the project would disturb community members during sleeping hours.
CDOT hopes to have the median project complete by December. The long work window is being blamed, in part, on the difficulty in procuring construction materials during COVID-19, and because of the intense prepwork associated with median construction, according to CDOT.
Additionally, removal of the road could expose high-risk contaminated materials and may add time to process them and dispose of them to help ensure the safety of workers.
“There are a few items that can impact project schedules that we have seen recently, specifically material procurement such as signal poles, paint, concrete,” Allison said. “The availability of some of these has been impacted by COVID.”
Throughout the 13 years since the action control plan was formed, CDOT has met with business owners along the proposed median route to try to come to an understanding.
McShan said CDOT offered him a three-quarter turn space directly south of his business to access the south property line of his shop.
“When they first asked me about it, I just said I can’t do it that way, because No. 1, you’d be turning into the corner of my building. And No. 2, I’d be losing my display area for the cars I have to sell. Because that entrance is for ingress only, you can’t go out that way. Which means my display area would become a driveway,” McShan said.
The median plan is paid for through the state’s FASTER program, which is an established road safety fund to support the construction, reconstruction or maintenance of projects that the state transportation commission determines is needed to enhance the safety of a city street, county road or state highway.
“To get FASTER safety funding we do have to meet particular standards, such as crash data and safety needs,” Allison said. “So the project is based on actual data for that stretch of highway. When we take on a project, it’s because there’s a safety need.”
McShan said the medians are from a 13-year-old action control plan and no longer fit the needs for safety in the area.
“We don’t need medians here, we need a stoplight at 11th Street,” McShan said. “While it may solve CDOT’s thoroughfare problem on the state highway, it exacerbates an already bad traffic problem in the city.”
McShan aired his concerns at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting. After hearing him speak, councilors asked staff members if it would be possible to work with CDOT on designs that might be more amenable to business owners along where the medians are being constructed.
“We’re late in the game, but there’s always room for conversation,” interim city engineer Keith Dougherty said.
Dougherty was asked by the council if he felt like the city’s Public Works Department had any sort of say in CDOT’s project.
“I think they take our comments into account, but there’s always the question of timing. They have prioritization and funding that doesn’t always align with the city,” Dougherty said. “Sometimes, they do push ahead, but it’s their highway. They kind of have that right.”
Council also expressed concern with how CDOT’s median project may interfere with a project the city is pursuing. Two weeks ago, through the city’s multimodal transportation department, the Camino Crossing underpass was put out for bid and awarded to a design firm.
“One of the more heavily used crossings of Camino del Rio is at 12th Street because a lot of people come off the Animas River Trail at that point and head into downtown,” said Durango Public Works Director Allison Baker. “The idea is that the underpass would replace the pedestrian crossing that’s currently there and would be a safety improvement of (U.S. Highway) 550, which is where they’re currently putting in medians.”
While the timelines between CDOT’s median project and the city’s new underpass project don’t overlap, City Council was concerned a lack of communication between projects could result in a portion of the new medians being ripped out to meet the city’s needs.
“There could be a potential for roughly 50 feet of the median that’s currently being installed to be impacted by the Camino Crossing project,” Baker said.
However, CDOT said it is aware of the underpass project, and has decided that from a safety perspective it makes sense to put in the planned median while the city brings the underpass project to fruition.
“Those are safety needs, and we didn’t want to remove those safety needs with an unknown time frame of construction because right now they’re just getting proposals,” Allison said. “We didn’t want to risk removing safety needs with the potential of not having that there at any point of the city’s timeline.”
Mayor Pro Tem Barbara Noseworthy asked City Manager José Madrigal if it would be possible to work on communication between the council and CDOT in order to work more cohesively. Madrigal said opening that line of communication was definitely possible.
“I wonder if there are things we can do as a city to work on our relationship with the CDOT ... so they understand that it may be their highway, but it is our community,” Noseworthy said.
njohnson@durangoherald.com
