To the editor:
This is a letter to the editor, the three county commissioners and the highway superintendent.
I just want you to know about the horrible condition of Becks Grove Road. I learned after I had two broken legs and one broken foot due to falls since Thanksgiving eve 2019 just how bad this road has become.
As I was driven home from the orthoped’s office with new casts on my broken legs, I was almost screaming with pain before we got off this road onto the nice one we actually live on.
You cannot avoid the thousand or more bumps, sunken sewer pipes, nor the many new tire-busting holes in this road. All the problems are in each side on the driver’s right hand side, no matter which direction you are traveling. The old holes have been filled so many times that they have become more like cobblestones than pavement. Instead of holes, they have become small mountains that you cannot avoid. Due to the rolling nature of the road, you cannot see far enough ahead to avoid having a head-on collision, so you rattle across these inverted holes and usually hit many of the craters that have appeared this spring.
I know there is at least one sewer pipe that was replaced about 12 to 15 years ago and never leveled up. This is a jarring sensation when you have to hit it because of so much traffic on the road.
It is one of two east-west corridors in the southern part of Van Buren Township. It handles not only local traffic, but is a thru-way for many people who reside in northern Jackson County and use it as a way to work, mostly in flood times to avoid the Ogilville lowlands in Bartholomew County. I have traditionally seen more traffic on this one road than on State Road 135, which is also in horrendous condition. It, too, is desperate for repaving. State Road 135 needs several sewer replacements, and in many cases needs to be completely redone.
I remember last year that the county had appropriated several hundred thousand dollars for road paving projects. Then I read where Brown County also received $1 million in grant money for road improvements. I have seen some improvements down here, namely Bellsville Pike and Christianburg Road, but nothing further. Why wasn’t some of this money spent on Becks Grove Road?
This road was last paved many years ago when Jim Kelp was road superintendent, and little has been done since that time except to drop some loose paving material off a truck into a hole, then pounded into place with a shovel or run over by the dump truck tires.
It is time to stop treating Van Buren Township as the stepchild it has always been in this county. We deserve as much consideration as any of the other townships.
Get with it, guys, or find someone to run the highway department who cares about all of us.
Thanks.
Helen Ayers, Keith Donaldson Road
