Benton County farmers fuming after botched road work

After above-average rainfall this spring, Bud Hamilton should be sitting pretty.

He’s a dryland wheat farmer with 7,000 acres near Rattlesnake Mountain. The extra rain translates into a bumper crop.

The condition of some county roads, however, could foil his ability to get it to market.

Hamilton and other Benton County farmers are upset after county road crews apparently failed to complete spring maintenance and updates, leaving some stretches of the county’s 200-plus miles of gravel roads rocky, pitted and cut off from neighboring fields.

Some of the roads affected include Franks, Pearl and Rothrock roads, stretching from Rattlesnake Mountain to the Horse Heaven Hills.

“In the spring, we could hardly move our sprayers around and fertilizer trucks were getting stuck,” Hamilton said.

Hamilton and other frustrated farmers plan to take their complaints to the county’s elected commissioners when they meet at 9 a.m. Tuesday at the courthouse, 620 Market St., Prosser.

Hamilton blames a system of creating ditches to channel stormwater for the problem, claiming road crews were ordered to pile dirt and debris on the roads, then mix it into the gravel, upending the traditional roadbed recipe.

Matt Rasmussen, Benton County engineer, acknowledged the complaint has merits, but said it’s more complicated.

“We obviously had some miscommunications going on,” he said.

Repairing the damage ahead of the harvest is a top priority. The county will spend nearly $36 million maintaining about 1,000 miles of both paved and unpaved roads during the 2017-19 biennium.

It is not on a ditch-digging spree, he promised.

Rather, it was attempting to address some of the road conditions that allowed the winter-related storms to wash out some roads and damage others.

As it performed its annual spring maintenance on gravel roads, it focused on balancing the need to handle it the sudden deluges that are the hallmark of spring thunderstorms in the region with the needs of farmers to access fields.

It worked to create better channels to culverts, but also to tame some of the deeper ditches that act as barriers to fields. Cleaning weeds from some ditches may have left the impression they were deepened.

“There are places where ditches are needed. But where we don’t need them, I don’t want to have them,” he said.

Commissioners want a fast resolution. July marks the start of the wheat harvest in Washington.

“The farm to market roads are paramount,” said Commissioner Shon Small, who drove many of the affected roads and confirmed finding rocks large enough to damage a vehicle.

“When we see road conditions like this, it is completely unacceptable. We are engaged and we will be doing everything to get the roads as good as they should be,” he said.

There’s disagreement on who is responsible, but Small said the county will root it out.

Hamilton, who believes road crews are being unfairly blamed, said assurances aren’t enough.

“It’s destroying the roads,” he said. “You upset farmers, we don’t calm down easily.”

This story was originally published May 22, 2017 at 7:06 PM with the headline "Benton County farmers fuming after botched road work."