By Ken Smith
Turnagain Times
The Girdwood Board of Supervisors signed a one year-extension with McKenna Bros. Paving Co. Inc. The road contractor was hired last year for road maintenance and snow removal. The contract period starts Nov. 1.
The budget for the road maintenance this year is between $500,000 and $600,000 depending on the amount of work that needs to be done, said Tim Cabana, the new Roads Supervisor for the GBOS. Cabana took over the position last month after the former Roads Supervisor, Jim Henderson, resigned due to family obligations. Mathew McKenna, a partner in McKenna Bros., said they came in under budget this past year. In addition, he said the company purchased new equipment mid-way through the season to operate more efficiently.
As for the company’s first year maintaining Girdwood roads, McKenna admits it’s been a learning curve, but he said they received positive responses from the community.
“I’m actually really pleased,” McKenna said. “It was an active learning curve at the beginning. In a town that big, it’s hard to please everybody, but overall, I think people are pretty happy. If we got a foot of snowfall, we got it cleaned up in 24 hours, when in the past it’s taken three or four days. And last year we got hit pretty hard, but it’s expected in Girdwood.”
The company had a busy year with summer road maintenance, ditching and clearing blocked culverts. McKenna said they did about six miles of ditching on the sides of roads, three miles in each direction. And with the recent heavy rainfall, clearing and replacing old culverts has been a big project and will continue to be for the long-term.
The problem with the culverts, McKenna said, is that they are blocked up with mud, brush and any other organic matter that flows into them. Compounding the problem are culvert ends that have been smashed closed. So the work not only entails clearing debris out of the culverts, but cutting off the ends to open them up.
“A lot of the flooding problems are the result of blocked up culverts,” McKenna said. “It’s a slow process to open them up. It sometimes takes three or four hours or two to three for driveway culverts.”
Besides clearing blocked culverts, the GBOS purchased 20 new culverts, half of which have already been used. But it’s far short of what is needed to fix all the flooding problems in the valley.
“There are hundreds of culverts that are plugged and need work,” Cabana said, “We don’t have it in our budget to fix everybody’s driveway culverts, and people need to be responsible for themselves.”
Flooding in the valley is an annual problem due to excessive snow melt requiring constant maintenance, McKenna said.
“There’s a lot of water from melting snow each year,” he said. “It’s not that it can’t be dealt with, but it’s going to be a four or five year deal.”
Then there’s ditching, something McKenna said is a job in itself.
“We did a lot of that last year,” he said, “and we have a lot more to do. It’s been 20 years since this work has been done.”
In order to keep up with the amount of road maintenance required year-round, McKenna Bros. has purchased a great deal of new equipment. They bought two new highway plows, two new pick-up truck plows, and one new sander. The company now has a total of four plow trucks, three sanders and three graders.
“We’re just trying to make it efficient, so that it doesn’t take three days to get it cleaned up,” he said. “We want the roads cleared so people can go to work and drop their kids off at school.
In the meantime, the GBOS is trying to solicit more money from the state to pay for the millions of dollars of work needed to improve Girdwood roads.
“We’re actively trying to get funding from the state of Alaska,” Cabana said. “So if people want to call their legislators and lobby for funding road drainage and road improvements, go right ahead. It’s probably going to cost $3 or $4 million dollars to get the drainage issues resolved and some of the higher volume roads paved.”
And finally, Cabana had some words of praise for the current road contractor and an additional request.
“The work they’ve done I think is really good,” he said, “and I think spot paving needs to continue to be done, especially while our roads contractor just happens to be a paving contractor, which we’ve never had before.”