Road project eyed for corner of Custer County

Custer County commissioners started the groundwork this week for major repairs to a heavily traveled road in the far northeastern corner of the county.
It’s County Road 850 which is located north of the Canadian River and runs from just west of State Highway 33 east for two miles into Blaine County where it connects with American Horse Road, which is also heavily traveled and goes on over to Geary.
Commissioners voted Monday to approve a contract agreement with the Oklahoma Circuit Engineering District Board that would allow Commissioner Kurt Hamburger to seek funding from the CED to pay for the road, if he decides to use that option. 
Hamburger, whose district includes that part of Custer County, said the road is used by quite a few local folks who live in the area, along with lots of oil field traffic. The latter is especially true now with the hot STACK play extending into Custer County. (STACK stands for Sooner Trend Anadarko Basin, Canadian and Kingfisher counties and is currently one of Oklahoma’s two most active areas.)
Hamburger said the road sustained damage from the 2015 flood that ended this area’s big four-year drought, when a 60-foot section of drainage pipe running along the road blew out.
Rather than replacing the pipe, he’s looking at putting in a concrete box which of course would have to be longer than the pipe section that blew out. He told his fellow commissioners that John Northup with Circuit Engineering District No. 7 has done some preliminary work and figures it will take around half a million dollars to do the work.
Asked where the money will come from, Hamburger said he’s looking at two possibilities. One would be funds borrowed from Circuit Engineering District No. 7 on a no-interest loan that would have to be paid back within a year, but he said that could be done with money he receives monthly from the CED for projects in his district, just as other commissioners do.
The other possibility would be primarily a 75-percent hazard mitigation grant which might be available through the Federal Emergency Management Fund. If it were received, he said he would have to pay 25 percent of the project’s cost with funds from his district but FEMA would pay the remaining 75 percent.
“So I’m going to hope we get the hazard mitigation grant,” he said. “We don’t have to pay it back.”
Hamburger said the county’s emergency management director, Mike Galloway, has been on top of the project and has “great contacts” with emergency management people at the state level. “Hopefully they will prove very valuable,” he said.
He also said he wouldn’t mind paying 25 percent to get a half-million-dollar project done.
“Like other FEMA projects, I would have to front the money and get reimbursed,” he said. “According to Galloway, it’s the type project that would qualify for a FEMA grant.
“We’re like beggars. We kinda hunt, peck and search for money anywhere we can get it.
“This road is kinda like a big dam. It’s a pretty deep canyon, and it’s built up. We had talked about building a bridge there, but we think this box is a better option. It was extended in 2007 but has failed, plus it has a running creek going through it. It’s played out its usefulness.”
Hamburger said the washout is one mile south of the Dewey County line and four-tenths of a mile west of Blaine County.
Asked if they might help, he laughed and said, “They probably don’t want to share.”
As for when the project might be started, Hamburger said the action commissioners took Monday will have to be routed through the CED7 board and then through the state CED board.
“I roughly put an Aug. 1 start date on it, but I’m not sure that’s realistic,” he said. “There’s still nothing officially engineered, so there are still lots of steps to go through.”