Monday, August 11, 2008

Paving on Mount Gilead Road

Here's an interesting article from yesterday's Washington Post about road paving on Mount Gilead Road.

According to the Post, maintenance crews repaired a small stretch of pavement on Mount Gilead Road west of Leesburg last week.

"It was a minor affair, by road maintenance standards -- a job that cost $15,000 at most, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation said. But the work reignited a dispute over the winding country road that three years ago pitted neighbor against neighbor and became a symbol of the contentious debate over growth in Loudoun County."

The Post article added that "Mike P. Salmon, a VDOT spokesman, said last week's work was necessary to fix a drainage problem. But some residents are saying that it's too soon to send crews back to the short section of Mount Gilead that was paved in 2005 after a bitter fight before the Loudoun Board of Supervisors. The paving was proposed in 2004 by two Mount Gilead residents who said the rutted gravel road posed a safety hazard. The proposal was criticized by several of their neighbors, who said that the danger was exaggerated and that a smoother surface would ruin the road's country feel and hasten development."

"The board sided with those who favored paving but agreed to limit it to a short stretch where a majority of residents had said they supported it. So, using a portion of Loudoun's transportation allocation, VDOT paved less than a mile of the four-mile road."

Got a thought on the paving job? Live on Mount Gilead Road? Let us know what you think.

1 comment:

  1. They should pave the damn whole road. Its not like there is going to be a bundh of traffic on this dead end street. I guess the bumkins that live on the unpaved section now would rather eat my dust, grit, gravel all over their cars and houses and lungs rather than have me quietly pass by.

    Or else they would prefer the schoolbus to hit a rut or skid on the chatter into their houses or off the side of the road.

    Ridiculous.
    Signed, a sensible homeowner with modern internet access on the paved section.

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