Rolling  across the brown prairie of southeast El Paso County, Myers Road isn’t a place where motorists are likely to  pull over and admire the view. Baked in summer, windswept in winter, it’s desolate in any season.

It’s one of the county’s lesser-traveled roads, but that didn’t stop officials from spending more than $1.3 million to upgrade a 13.2 mile stretch.

“It was a political decision versus an engineering decision,” said John McCarty. The former county engineer and head of the county’s Department of Transportation resigned in the summer of 2008, around the same time the Myers Road project was approved by the El Paso County Board of Commissioners. 

The upgrade, which gobbled up about a tenth of the county’s annual  transportation budget, also violated the county’s policies, records show. In 2007, the county commission adopted the “El Paso County Road Surfacing Policy,” a document which lays out guidelines for converting gravel roads to paved roads. The policy states that the average daily traffic count on roads must exceed 200 to be considered for a “surface conversion.”

Myers Road came close to the 200-car level only once when 196 cars were counted near the intersection with Peyton Highway. By comparison, other county roads see in excess of 15,000 cars a day. “My guys would say you could work all day out there and see only a dozen cars,” said McCarty.

To stretch their dollars, transportation officials also implemented a  policy which basically consists of maintaining roads and eliminating expensive upgrades. 

Commissioner Amy Lathen, in whose district the road is located, was one of the driving forces behind the Myers Road improvement project. In discussing what roads should be upgraded in 2008, she argued, among other things, that Myers Road should be a priority as a major “corridor.”

Although Myers Road is one of the only east-west thoroughfares  in the southern part of the county,  it still feels more like a country lane than a corridor. It’s a good place for birders, who have seen a few lesser prairie-chickens and as many as eight short-eared owls along the roadway on a single evening.

Despite its low traffic counts, Myers Road has long been a headache for county officials, in part because  of an outspoken woman named Maria Jindra, whose house is located alongside Myers Road. For 15 years, Jindra has been dialing up the transportation department when Myers Road got too dusty or too rutted. She’s prepared PowerPoint presentations for various hearings, taken local officials on tours, and holds a seat on the Highway Advisory Commission, which makes recommendations to the county commissioners about improvements to the roughly 2,000 miles of paved and unpaved roads in El Paso County. “I’m trying to ring the bell out here,” Jindra says unapologetically. 

For years, Maria Jindra and her husband, Jeffrey, watched as hay haulers, livestock haulers, sludge haulers, delivery trucks and other vehicles rattled up and down the road, blanketing their home and others with a fine coating of chalk-colored dust. “It would enrage me,” Jindra said.

Road crews regularly sprayed the road to the east and west of the Jindras’ house with magnesium chloride, a service that cost the county several thousand dollars a year.  But the dust  would soon return.

When Amy Lathen began campaigning in 2007 for the District 2 seat being vacated by shrink-government enthusiast Douglas Bruce, Jindra threw her support behind Lathen. “I campaigned for her because her platform was roads.”  Jindra held up a pro-Lathen sign one weekend and contributed $200  to Lathen’s campaign. 

Lathen emphasized that Jindra’s support did not affect her position on Myers Road. “That road was an issue long before I came on the board.”

About the time that Lathen was sworn in, Maria Jindra sought to get the county’s Highway Advisory Commission to add Myers Road to the county’s paving list. That list, which is generated by a computer program,  prioritizes which thoroughfares should be fixed based on such factors as traffic, proximity to schools, development and the residents’ desires. Not surprisingly, Myers didn’t make the cut.

The following month, Jindra again pressed for improvements. This time, she asked that Myers be added to the list of roads to be chip-sealed. Chip-sealing is a process in which a mixture of  oil and gravel are laid down on a gravel surface. “You spray down a thick coating of oil and drop rocks into the oil,” said McCarty.  Although McCarty concedes that chip-sealing is a lot cheaper than surfacing a road with hot asphalt, he maintains that process has to be done properly or the road falls apart. In addition, the chip-sealing process is normally used to repair paved roads — not improve gravel roads, he said.

Jindra’s proposal to put Myers Road at the top of the 2008 chip-seal list failed before the Highway Advisory Commission on a 6-2 vote. She then turned to the El Paso County commissioners, arguing that Myers Road was good candidate for chip-sealing. As evidence, she pointed to the fact that two miles of the road had been chip-sealed nearly two decades ago and had held up well.

Jindra found a sympathetic listener in Lathen, who was frustrated by the short shrift roads in her district had been given. Despite McCarty’s misgivings and the county’s own guidelines for upgrading roads, Lathen saw chip-sealing as a viable alternative to an expensive paving job.  “Once I decided that chip-sealing was a viable option, we began to go down that road, so to speak,”  Lathen said.

The county commission voted 4 to 1 to chip-seal Myers Road, with Commissioner Wayne Williams casting  the dissenting vote. “We have other roads in the county that we have converted from gravel to pavement’” he said. “Those counts are in excess of 1,000 a day. In my opinion, I didn’t think it had the traffic volume to justify the conversion.”

As a consequence, several other road projects were put on hold and crews working on other thoroughfares were pulled off and assigned to Myers Road. “It was a huge benefit to a small group of people and a detriment to hundreds of others who lost maintenance on their roads,” said McCarty.

Maria Jindra and her neighbors are satisfied “Everyone out here was angry and now we’ve  died and gone to heaven,” she said.

From her south-facing windows,  two large stock trucks, a truck hauling a horse trailer, a sheriff’s patrol car, and  couple of commuters rumble past Then a profound silence envelops the glittering and empty road. 

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Call the writer at 476-4825.

Myers Road one of the county’s lesser-traveled roads, but that didn’t stop officials from spending more than $1.3 million to upgrade a 13.2 mile stretch. Photo by CAROL LAWRENCE / THE GAZETTE

CAROL LAWRENCE,THE GAZETTE