Whose lane is it anyway?

WALLACE –– A highly trafficked section of road is at the top of Shoshone County Public Works Director Jessica Stutzke’s to-do list, but people are going to need to be patient with the county.  

Numerous drivers have complained about the three-mile stretch of Silver Valley Road between Osburn and Wallace, specifically regarding the lack of visible road lines and markings.  

“We’ve definitely heard the complaints, both in-person and online,” Stutzke said. “And we’re going to address the issue as soon as possible. That section is very unique because it’s wider in some areas, with several spots with multiple lanes. It’s not just simple fog lines and center lines.”  

Tiffany Willer, from Osburn, wrote the News-Press in December expressing her frustrations with the road. 

"The lines are so faded it makes it hard to tell what part of the road I am on at night because the lines are basically nonexistent," Willer wrote. "The roads have been repainted in Osburn and Wallace, but the road between Wallace and Osburn are in dire need of new paint." 

As Willer said, the road is navigable in the daylight, despite the lack of consistent lines, but at nighttime or during heavy rain, it’s almost impossible to really discern the different lanes or turnout areas along the road. In the interim, the county has placed several delineators along the road to outline the road’s edges and curves, which is the extent that Stutzke’s department can do while the weather is cold and wet.  

Stutzke had planned on getting the road chip sealed and painted during the 2024 construction season, but what she wasn’t prepared for were the closures of nearly all of the Silver Valley’s east end on and off ramps to Interstate 90.  

“We knew that the work on I-90 was going to divert some traffic from the freeway onto the road, but we didn’t know that everything east of Osburn was going to be closed and that the road would be handling all of the traffic,” Stutzke said. “We couldn’t, in good conscience, add more work and more delays to an area that was already experiencing higher than normal traffic.”  

Along with the concerns for people’s time and convenience, Stutzke was concerned with the probability of having to redo much of the work because of the heavy traffic. 

The county contracts all of its road painting work out, and due to the rising costs of everything in the construction world, she wasn’t willing to add unnecessary additional costs to taxpayers.  

According to Stutzke, the county budgeted $65,000 last year for road painting, which was spent remarking a 20-mile section of road along the St. Joe River in the southern region of Shoshone County, but the project ended up costing almost $90,000 due to increased costs.  

Stutzke hasn’t put the project out for bidding yet but anticipates that it could cost around between $10-20,000 to complete with the chip sealing.  

“When we do it, we’re going to do it right,” Stutzke said. “There are perfect conditions for this kind of work and that’s what we’ll be looking for, but it’s on our schedule to get done as soon as the weather allows.”