Cerro Gordo supervisors approve road maintenance agreement with City of Clear Lake

CLEAR LAKE — The Cerro Gordo County Board of Supervisors on Monday approved a road maintenance agreement with the City of Clear Lake.

County Engineer Brandon Billings says the county up until now has had road maintenance agreements with all government entities that the county borders internally or externally except for Clear Lake.  “This was an agreement that started a long, long time ago. It kind of got tabled for a while. As things changed, we were able to talk to them again and we came to an agreement on adjoining roads for maintenance activities and for snow plowing.”

Billings says the agreement covers the guidelines on how shared roads will be dealt with for snow removal and repair.  “Any time we have plowing now, some of the roads are the first people there plow the roads, some of them are you are responsible for shouldering and doing potholes and painting. Then we split up how, if there’s a big culvert project or other maintenance thing on shared roads how it’s split up. It’s just kind of dictates exactly the responsibilities of each entity, so there’s no questions, nothing really to argue about, or forget to do.”

The Clear Lake City Council approved the agreement at their March 17th meeting.

Clear Lake and the county earlier in the year also entered into an agreement to replace a bridge on 275th Street over Willow Creek on the northern edge of the community’s corporate city limits. The county owns the bridge but was not eligible for federal funding through the Iowa Department of Transportation’s “City Bridge Funding Program”, but the city was eligible, and a so-called “border bridge” project also met eligibility requirements.