Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

Area road work in monetary bind

In order to accommodate local traffic, governments in Curry and Roosevelt counties have continuous high-cost improvements to make.

But the money to make them is another story.

“Ranching, farming, your dairies, your 9-1-1, your emergency calls, your first responders — it affects everybody. The (road) infrastructure is what gets everybody from place A to place B,” Roosevelt County Road Superintendent Ricky Lovato said of local roads.

Out of 118 chipsealed roads in Roosevelt County, 90 miles are in need of new chipsealing or fog sealing “before we lose them,” according to Lovato.

“We’ve got 1,232 miles we take care of, but chipsealed roads are in really bad shape right now,” he said, adding that $391,000 in Local Government Road Funds (LGRF) will soon fix the 18 miles in the most dire need of repair.

Lovato said fog-sealed and chipsealed roads require improvements about every five years.

“There’s never enough funding to do what we need to do, so we fix the roads that are in dire need now. A tank of oil is roughly $9,000 (per mile) and rock aggregate is roughly about $6,000 (per mile) and to get it delivered is $2,000 per mile,” Lovato said to give perspective on what each mile of road costs to fix. “$400,000 does not go a long ways when you have 1,230 miles to work on. They’ll (roads in need) just get cycled in every year we do LGRF. ”

And not all the money from LGRF is being used for chipsealed roads. Some is used for caliche, which is more expensive than chipseal, costing about $15,000 per mile.

Though Curry County has laid out its five-year plan for road projects, there are items funding has not yet been secured for, according to Road Superintendent Dennis Fury.

“There’s some roads like CR (Curry Road) 3 that need to be sealed, and Brady (Avenue) between MLK (Jr. Boulevard) and (New Mexico) 467 needs to be sealed again. We haven’t gotten those funds yet, but we thought we were going to,” said Fury.

The city of Clovis is experiencing a similarly high volume of road construction projects, which Public Works Director Clint Bunch said comes primarily from grants.

Community Development Block Grant (CDBG)-funded projects coming to Clovis this year, pending approval from the city commission, are improvements to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard from West Seventh Street to the railroad tracks south of West Grand Avenue and Sandoval Street from West Seventh Street to West Grand Avenue.

The first phase of construction for a project that will cost several million will also begin in the summer, Bunch said.

“We’re in the design phase of it right now, and it will run on Seventh Street between Norris and Main. I have a little over $1 million to do phase one, which will be the drainage portion of Seventh Street, between Norris and the Ingram Channel,” he said.

Bunch said there is a possibility some roads could become dangerous if not maintained, but the Clovis street department is constantly on-hand to make repairs.

“If there’s ever a dangerous situation, they’re on top of it right away. After hours and on the weekends, we’re on a pager system, so they get called out all hours of the night and day,” he said.