Officials from Tamarack Resort told Valley County commissioners on Monday that West Mountain Road north of the ski area must be re-built this summer after big trucks and heavy traffic took its toll on the road over the last year.
Tamarack CEO Jean-Pierre Boespflug, Tamarack attorney Steve Millemann and Tamarack Director of External Affairs Scott Turlington visited commissioners Monday to talk about the schedule for re-building the road.
Boespflug said Tamarack has paid about $740,000 to area agencies in accordance with agreements and that those payments have been "money well spent."
The resort has paid $367,000 to the McCall-Donnelly and Cascade school districts to offset new students, $307,000 to Valley County :o pay for county services, and t6a000to the Donnelly Rural Fire Protection District, he said.
But Boespflug said he has a "twitch in his stomach" because the resort paid the county $50.000 two years ago to study the corridor between Donnelly and Tamarack and has not yet seen any plans for improving the roads.
Boespflugtold the commission that visitors' biggest complaint is that they "get shaken up too bad" on the way to the resort. The worst part of the drive is West Mountain Road between Tamarack Falls store and the resort - a road that does not reflect well on Tamarack or Valley County, he said.
On that stretch, the road is a layer of asphalt over gravel rather than a well-built road base, Valley County Road Superintendent Gordon Cruickshank said. Both resort and county officials agreed that everyone knell- the road would take a beating, but no one knew how soon improvements would be needed.
"I don't think we knew that road was going to go to hell as quickly as it did," commission Chairman Phil Davis said. "We thought we'd have more time to do this and we don't."
The county wants to build a wider base for the road, which runs along the west side of Lake Cascade and leads to Tamarack's main entrance. The road will also need to be re-surfaced and some turns will need to be straightened.
Doug Camenisch of the county's contract engineering firm, Parametrix of Boise, said he is working with the Forest Service and the Bureau of Reclamation on how much right-of-way the county owns for the road. He said he has enough information to do preliminary design work and is in the process of giving Cruickshank an estimate of how much it will cost the county for Parametrix to design the road.
That news discouraged Boespflug. He said that trying to agree with federal agencies on how much land is available would take too long and push the project into next year. He also said the county's plan to build the road as a "major collector" - with 28 feet of pavement - is overkill.
Boespflug encouraged the county to put money into the road base and drainage work and pave the road as a "minor collector" with no more than 24 feet of pavement. That would allow more paving work to be done elsewhere in the county while maintaining the "rural character" of the area, he said.
The extra four feet of a major collector "could add a lot moremoney (to the project) than we think," Boespflug said. Camenisch said whatever the county decides should be based on future need rather than available funding, and that picking a design based solely on cost would set an "extremely bad precedent."
He also said the road base should be built to last for decades no matter what the width of paved road.
"This is a high-profile county road," Camenisch said. "Whatever we do here will ripple through the rest of the county. If you deviate from the standard, that's your new standard."
Cruickshank said he and Camenisch would work on alternative plans and costs associated with those alternatives and present them to Tamarack for comment.
The county's capital contribution agreement with Tamarack calls for the resort to contribute 30 percent of the cost of improving access roads between Donnelly and Tamarack and gives resort officials a voice in the design of those improvements.
Camenisch also said he is working on preliminary plans for road improvements between Donnelly and West Mountain Road on West Roseberry; Norwood and Tamarack Falls roads.
The county is also planning to build a new road that would connect West Roseberry and Tamarack Falls roads through pastureland that is quickly filling up with home sites.
Cruickshank committed to work fast on the project and estimated that the county could be ready to bid and award the work on West Mountain Road by July 1.
