CHARLYNN ANDERSON - North County Staff | Posted: Thursday, August 24, 2006 11:00 pm
With crumbling shoulders and potholes aplenty, not to mention arsenic-laden dust, Fairfield's 1600 North is going from bad to worse and town leaders want the damage to stop.
At the August Town Council meeting, council members voted unanimously to post signs limiting the size of the vehicles permitted on the road. The signs will categorize as oversized vehicles longer than 53 feet or weighing more than 80,000 pounds.
Large semitrailer trucks travel along the road regularly, most running to and from businesses in Eagle Mountain. Town leaders point to the truck traffic as a major cause of damage to the road.
"Do we just let those people destroy the roads of Fairfieldfi" Mayor Lynn Gillies said.
The last time the town tried to limit truck traffic on the street, it lost a court case. This time might be different, though.
A video safety analysis of Fairfield roads sanctioned by the Utah County Sheriff's Office has revealed that 1600 North is too narrow for oversize trucks with trailers to turn onto State Road 73 without crossing the center line and blocking both lanes of SR 73. Sheriff's deputies have already begun issuing safety citations for lane violations at the intersection.
Fairfield's leaders acknowledged that the size limitation signs may provoke another lawsuit, but this time the signs are complying with a Utah Department of Transportation safety regulation, not a town law.
In June 2005, the council passed a weight limitation law for the street, then rescinded it and approved a slightly more lenient one in August 2005. Six businesses with trucks that use 1600 North sued for an injunction against the town the following month.
In November 2005 4th District Judge Anthony W. Schofield handed down an injunction preventing the town from enforcing the law, ruling that enforcement of the weight limitation would cause major financial harm to the businesses.
There is another available route for the trucks -- an unpaved Eagle Mountain road that's 6 miles shorter one way. Fairfield's deteriorating 1600 North is chip sealed, though, and presents a more passable option even if it's longer than the alternate route.
After the court case was settled, representatives of the trucking businesses had pledged they would help repair 1600 North, but informal discussions on road repairs stalled when they tried to determine what repairs were necessary. Town leaders insisted that the road needed more than pothole patches.
Repairing the chip-seal surface of 1600 North would not provide the structural integrity necessary to support heavy trucks, according to a study conducted by Earth Tec Engineering in 2005. The road needs to be resurfaced, but bringing the road up to the engineer's recommendations may be costly for the tiny town of some 130 people -- $20,000 to single chip seal the road and $32,000 for a double chip seal.
This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page D1.