CLALLAM COUNTY – Now is the time for Clallam County’s annual ritual of road surface maintenance, commonly known as chip sealing, to begin. But due to Covid-19, as with many other aspects of life this year, those projects have been scrapped.

County Engineer Ross Tyler says the decision to cancel chip sealing was made 3 months ago. They saw that not only would the social distancing restrictions make it very difficult, if not impossible, for the dozens of workers to get the job done, but the sudden drop in gas tax revenues due to fewer people on the road took away their primary source of maintenance funding.

“We’ve got plenty of other stuff to do. We still have a lot of roads that we need to get prepared for even next year’s chip seal. But we can do it in bits-and-pieces, and manage our cash flow better, if we haven’t committed to this huge program that is is going to be very expensive if we get it started. So we just decided to to drop it for this year. First time in 35 years that I’ve been here that we have chosen to do it.”

The annual budget for chip sealing is usually about $1.5 million and typically covers around 50 miles of county roads.

That’s not to say all road construction in the county is stalled. About $7.9 million worth of projects are or soon will be underway, most of which are done by contractors and rely heavily on federal funding. Those include work on Carlsborg, Black Diamond and Dry Creek Roads, for example, as well as multiple culvert replacement projects.

Tyler says he’s comfortable with the decision to cut back on the budget this year, but he’s less sure about what’s in store for the coming year, particularly in what the feds are going to provide for future projects.

“We’re all going to know a lot more about how this covid thing’s going to probably progress in the long term by the time we get into, you know, October/November. So we’ll have to make decisions about how much we’re going to plan to spend in next year and the year after that. It’s a pretty fluid equation right at the moment, but it…we’ll get through it.”