FRANKTOWN, Colo. - Residents in Franktown, an unincorporated community in Douglas County, are raising concerns after the county began paving a stretch of Tanglewood Road — a dirt road many use to access nearby open spaces on horseback and by foot,
"It is an equestrian large animal keeping community, and we love it here," shared Resident Carin Shuler.
Shuler said residents were not notified before work began.
"They didn't have any road work signs up, it was just other residents saying, 'Hey, what's happening here?' And we began to try to question the workers. No supervisor was on site, so a lot of calls into the public works department, and we began to ask a lot of questions," Shuler detailed.
The material being used is recycled asphalt milling — a process in which old asphalt is scraped off existing roads, mixed with tar, and applied to the road surface.
The county is getting this material from a project being done at the nearby Deerfield community.
Residents say the project has widened the road, leaving limited space for horses and pedestrians along the shoulder. They also say the material itself poses risks.
"It can create cracks in their hooves, it can be hard to pick out the tar, get caught in the paws of dogs. It can even ruin the underside, the undercarriage of cars. I spoke with a mechanic, and he said he has far more cars in from damage from that type of milling and filling than any asphalt or even dirt gravel road," Shuler said.
The open space along Tanglewood Road is central to the Franktown community.
► Watch Tyler Melito's video in the player below:
"We have our annual picnic, the firefighters come out and enjoy a good barbecue here with us. So we have Easter egg hunt out here. There's a lot of activity in our open space, besides the equestrian and dog walking and bicycling and hiking that we enjoy out here," Shuler said.
Douglas County Assistant Director of Public Works Dan Roberts said the county has approximately 250 miles of gravel roads and that growing population has increased traffic on all of them. He says the material comes from milled asphalt they have taken off from other projects.
"We grind off the a lot of the top, the old asphalt on the top, and sort of like a gravel-like consistency, and so what we have started doing is when we grind that off, we either take it and store it in one of our maintenance facilities, and then we place it on roads in the fall," Roberts told Denver7's Tyler Melito.
He added dust control is a major driver of the paving effort.
"It takes millions of gallons of water to take care of our gravel roads, because we can't just go spray, you know. Dust is a big problem. We get a lot of complaints about dust. Can't just go spray them, it lasts a day, maybe. So we do a lot of spraying of gravel roads," Roberts detailed.
Roberts added the county has used recycled asphalt material for years but is still refining how it is applied.
He acknowledged the Tanglewood project may have had an unintended result.
"What I think happened out there — when you grind it off the road, as you can imagine, it gets pretty hot. That friction of grinding it, it's a big piece of equipment and I think that this Tanglewood project was so close to where they were removing it, I think it was still hot when they placed it on the road, and so it compacted just like new asphalt," Roberts said.
In an email obtained by Denver7, Operations Manager for Douglas County Public Works John Lamb wrote to a concerned resident in part:
"I am surprised that pedestrians and bicyclist would have negative concern. Spending a considerable amount of time working on gravel roads I do not miss the dust or being pelted by aggregate that follows passing vehicles."
Roberts said the project is not finished and that shoulder work is still planned.
"We probably will go out next week, and the very end of it needs to be cleaned up a little bit, and then obviously the shoulders, so we've got another week, or maybe a couple weeks, depending on the weather," Roberts said.
He said re-shouldering is standard practice for rural paving projects.
"Whenever we pave in rural areas where there's not curb and gutter, we always have to go in and re-shoulder because we do raise the elevation of the road," Roberts said.
On the question of resident notification, Roberts said the county follows a survey process for adjacent property owners but acknowledged it may need to be updated for projects using recycled material.
"We actually do have a survey that we follow, and we send out survey letters to all of the adjacent property owners, and over half of them have to agree to that," Roberts explained. "We may have to look at changing our process, because we haven't been doing that with these when we do this recycled material, because we treat it more like a gravel project."
Despite the concerns, Shuler said residents are not looking for a fight — only a solution that works for everyone.
"We're not trying to divide the community and say equestrians and dog walkers should rule. No, we want what's beneficial to all," Shuler said.
To learn more about Douglas County's Gravel Road Paving Program, you can do so here.
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