Bath’s Supervisors hold June meeting

It was no surprise at Tuesday evening’s Bath Board of Supervisors meeting many comments were focused on the current condition of roads. The board’s role was to approve the six-year secondary road plan, and that is what they did, but before that Bacova resident, David Powell, and the supervisors expressed concerns that even basic maintenance might need to preempt long-term improvements.

David Powell,

“It’s become a situation where patching it isn’t going to work anymore. And it’s throughout the whole town of Bacova, and we’re taking pictures, and we’re going to put something together and we’re going to present it to the state, but a lot of the people that live there are just blue collar guys, and they don’t attend these meetings because they feel their voice isn’t being heard. And we’re going to start meeting as a town, quarterly. And it’s really looking nice. Bacova’s coming back. People are taking a lot of pride in their homes, and they’re planting trees, and we’re taking care of the public areas, playgrounds.

Paul Siple Drive, Talbott Lane, and side ditches and culverts throughout the county were also mentioned as deserving immediate attention.

Eddie Hicklin, Millboro District had a question for Mrs. Hammond, Virginia Department of Transportation Residency Coordinator,

“If you’ve got a hundred and eighty thousand dollars for six years, you could blow that as far as tonight

“That’s correct.”

“Very easily”

“Yes”

“How do you prioritize what you do?”

“Well, there’s minimum criteria for what would even be eligible to be in your six-year plan. One of the things is traffic volume; a couple of the other things that we take into consideration is complaints that we’ve gotten over the year, one too is that we actually have a project link that we can move forward with, I don’t want your funds to sit in your six-year plan where we have a project that’s going to take four hundred thousand dollars and you can see if you get a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in six year, if we have an unrealistic dollar value for a project, so we’re trying to take small bites, which is why you see some shorter section of roadways that we are going to do that meet the criteria, and that also are unpaved, and there aren’t as many unpaved roads as there are in some of the others, and that’s part of how that dollar value in that six-year plan is calculated.”

In addition Susan Hammond continued,

“The amount of rainfall that we have had this year has been bar-none, at least in my experience, we’ had some pretty significant flooding in May, and then turned around and a couple of weeks later had the same areas that flooded again, so we’re doing work two and three times in locations, and that’s all coming from the same pool of maintenance dollars so one of the things we’re trying to address is making sure that at least for emergency situations that we don’t have properties that are cut off. We had two roads that had substantial damage, and actually people couldn’t get out, and we were able to go in there and get those open, I think probably within twenty-four hours of when the storm occurred.”

The Board approved the revised Emergency Operations Plan as presented by Andy Seaboldt, county emergency services coordinator. Also, in the context of approving another solid waste removal contract with CFI, County Administrator, Ashton Harrison assured the public efforts are being made to find solutions to reduced or eliminated access to recycling. He mentioned a couple of possibilities about which he is cautiously optimistic.

Story By

Bonnie Ralston

Bonnie Ralston is the Assistant Station Coordinator at WVLS and a Highland County news reporter. She began volunteering at Allegheny Mountain Radio in the fall of 2005. In 2006 she became an AMR employee and worked in Bath County for eight years as the WCHG Station Coordinator and then as the news reporter there. She began working in radio while in college and has stayed connected to radio, in one way or another, for more than thirty years. She grew up in Staunton, Virginia, while spending a lot of time on her family’s farm in Deerfield, Virginia. She enjoys spending time outside, watching old TV shows and movies and tending to her chickens.

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