Our LRSA roads suffer from chronic problems that your board attempts to solve or mitigate. Since road improvement can only be accomplished in the summer months, a harsh winter with its high snow removal costs can cause delays or project cancellations.
The Bear Valley LRSA is located at the top of tree line in the Chugach Mountains of Southcentral Alaska. Conditions here are as harsh as anyplace in Anchorage. In addition, our roads suffer from the problems listed below. BVLRSA RESIDENTS SHOULD NOT EXPECT ROADS IN THE LRSA TO BE MAINTAINED TO THE LEVEL ONE WOULD EXPECT IN THE MUNICIPAL LOWLANDS! Residents should expect weather and road conditions to insinuate themselves on daily life considerably more than they might in other parts of town.
Basic Maintenance Issues:
1. When residents first moved to this area, they created roads by pushing with a bulldozer, disregarding contours, streams, or soil types. They pushed over trees, dammed streams, and buried a lot of organic overburden. All of this debris is still beneath our roads. In the summer of 2009, we paid for twenty old tree stumps to be ground down below grade before they damaged vehicles. We have paid to have hollow logs, the original "culverts", removed and replaced with modern metal culverts. In many ways, our roads are still "Cat trails" (trails pushed by Caterpillar bulldozers).
2. Our roads have no suitable road bed on which to build or maintain high quality roads. Buried debris continues to allow water to undermine our roads, and little surface contouring ("crowns", or high points along the middle of roadways help channel water from the roads) keeps the road surface wet and subject to pothole creation.
3. Inadequate drainage results in severe overflow in winter. In the winter of 2008/9 for example, the LRSA spent $8000 on control of a single overflow problem. If inadequate early snowfall allows the ground to freeze, surface water is channeled to the roads. It freezes and causes our winter overflow problems. Too much water has always been our main maintenance problem.
4. Our moderate budget does not allow us the luxury of performing all of the maintenance that we identify.
5. Our population continues to increase. More residents driving on the same old roads has meant that the roads are increasingly difficult to manage. We also have the Chugach State Park entrance traffic during summer, as well as a new housing developement on Honeybear Lane. There is more traffic and thre are more heavy trucks on our roads.
5.The LRSA's primitive roads, whether surfaced with dirt, gravel or a thin asphalt cap, are strained by the number of vehicles and are especially effected by driving speed: even normal neighborhood driving speed that conventional paving can tolerate causes very rapid deterioration of our dirt road surface and helps create the deep potholes we see during non-snow months.