Monday’s Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) meeting at the Parachute Library was short and sweet. Very short, like, maybe half an hour. First up, but not on the agenda, were two area residents, Wesley Kent and Coreen Hamilton, who live on County Road (CR) 302. Actually, said Hamilton, “It is a county road from CR 301 to the first cattle guard and a U.S. Forest Service (USFS) road from the cattle guard to my property.” At issue is road maintenance and who is responsible for it. Kent mentioned increased traffic due to overall area growth, and promotion by the USFS and the Town of Parachute. “It’s the gateway to the Battlements,” explained Kent.
It’s also apparently the gateway to the Rulison blast site, where a 40-kiloton nuclear bomb was detonated underground in 1969 to release natural gas from oil shale. Sort of a nuclear fracking experiment gone wrong; the gas ended up radioactive and non-marketable. Rulison was one of several fracking experiments included in Project Plowshares, the brainchild of President Dwight Eisenhower and physicist Edward Teller, to find peaceful, civilian uses for nuclear energy.
Rulison was followed by the final experiment in 1973 — three, 33-kiloton underground detonations near Rifle, dubbed Project Rio Blanco. Kent said the U.S. Department of Energy has a monument and signs on CR 302, commemorating the Rulison blast.
He also said the road is in bad shape with two-foot deep ruts and washboard sections. “We’ve had fatalities, rollovers in the past due to the condition of the road.” Hamilton said she counted 536 vehicles traveling the road over 56 days.
“I have signs out there, trying to slow them down to 15 mph, but those ATVs fly by,” she explained. She told the BOCC that her son was almost run over more than once and that the Garfield County Sheriff’s office told her to contact the State Patrol. “Who do we call in an emergency?” she wondered. “Is Fire and Rescue going to be able to make it up the road?”
Kent mentioned an agreement between the county and the USFS to maintain the road once a year. “But, they haven’t touched sections of it in four or five years,” he said. “They haven’t cleaned the culverts, they haven’t cleaned the cattle guards, the infrastructure that they spent a lot of money putting in is not being maintained.”
Both Kent and Hamilton invited the BOCC to come up and see the road for themselves, and to find a way to remedy the situation. The BOCC said they’d look into it.
The sole big-ticket item on the agenda was to approve new energy codes. John Plano, Garfield County’s chief building official, talked about how HB19-1260 requires local jurisdictions to adopt one of the most recent versions of the International Energy Conservation Code beginning July 1. Plano said the choice is among the 2015, 2018, or 2021 codes, and that the county has chosen 2018.
“The tough part is that they’re not allowing us to weaken the energy performance whatsoever,” he explained. “We can’t change or amend the code to make it less stringent.” If the county does not make a decision by the deadline, he added, it will be locked into the 2021 code. Plano said that code restrictions could add at least $1,600 to the costs of building a new $500,000 home. “Between 2009 and 2018, that’s the national average,” he explained. “Our prices here are probably more expensive now.”
Plano described the county’s outreach efforts, which have included work sessions, emails to architects and builders, free software for commercial building compliance checks, and links on the county website to training videos and hand-outs. “The major differences that we’re going to be dealing with is air sealing and ventilation,” he explained. “Because this code requires blower door tests.”
Plano described various methods at testing leaks inside a home, including blower door tests and infrared cameras, and how to ventilate within the code restrictions. He added that the first year would probably be about educating contractors and architects. “In my previous employment, it took about a year to two years for the insulators and everybody to come up to speed on where they need to seal and how they need to seal it,” he said.
The BOCC unanimously approved the use of the 2018 code with amendments. The 2018 Energy Code Adoption Tool Kit is available at www.garfield-county.com/community-development