Heavy gravel truck traffic is taking a toll on Mormon Trail Road, leaving county officials to search for a way to fund repairs.

The 19-mile road, which runs along the western edge of Tooele Valley into Rush Valley, is an old dirt road that was mainly used by cattle ranchers and a few people needing a shortcut from Rush Valley to Grantsville. It was improved with some realignment, a bit of foundation work and paving about 20 years ago, according to Vern Loveless, director of Tooele County Engineering. But it is now crumbling with potholes and cracks — with some of the road having more patchwork than original road.

“When that road was paved years ago it was for light travel — passenger cars, pickup trucks — and within the last five or six years it’s been inundated with heavy truck traffic,” said Tooele County Commissioner Jerry Hurst.

Loveless said the road — 16 miles of which are within the county’s jurisdiction — needs a major overhaul estimated to cost $1 million a mile.

“In the last 10 or so years, where we’ve had a lot of development of gravel hauling and trucks from the Wal-Mart Distribution Center, we’re seeing a relatively high percentage of traffic on there being truck traffic,” Loveless said. “The impact of a heavy-axle truck on a road is thousands of times greater than that of a passenger vehicle. So you need to build your roads — and UDOT does this for all state highways — with sufficient foundation and enough road base underneath them that they’ll carry the concentrated loads that those heavy truck axles create. Mormon Trail Road does not have that good of a foundation under it.”

According to the Highway Research Board, one legal 80,000 pound GVW (gross volume weight) tractor-trailer does as much damage to road pavement as 9,600 cars.

Loveless said simply repaving the road wouldn’t solve the problem of the weak foundational base. He wants to bring the road up to the same standard as state highways.

“The cross-section I have in mind is what Highway 36 is on the south end of the county, like down through Vernon — just two lanes wide with a comfortable shoulder on the side and a foundation sufficient to carry heavy-axle trucks,” he said.

Loveless hopes to fund the repairs in stages, beginning with the areas most damaged by truck traffic and areas the public uses most frequently. But he doesn’t think repairs will begin for a few more years.

The Utah Department of Transportation has committed $2 million in federal money for the project in 2013, and the state has added approximately another $150,000, according to Loveless. In addition, the county has conditional approval to borrow $4.5 million at 2.5 percent interest over 20 years from the Utah Permanent Community Impact Board, which manages funds that come from mineral extraction.

Loveless said the county did apply for a CIB grant for the Mormon Trail Road, and while the county wasn’t granted the money, they were offered the low-interest loan.

“It turns out the Community Impact Board distributes funds that are collected off from federal lands for mineral extraction,” he said. “We have a lot of extraction taking place in Tooele County, but very little takes place on federal land, so Tooele County’s a relatively insignificant contributor.”

A request for another $2.5 million has also been submitted to Sen. Bob Bennett’s office for congressional funding, Loveless said.

Loveless believes approximately 75 percent of the gravel extracted in Tooele Valley goes to Salt Lake.

“It turns out that the point of sale of all that gravel, where the sales tax is collected, is at Salt Lake,” he said. “So we’re not collecting any exceptional road taxes or road-use fees.”

Loveless added that as sources along the Wasatch Front run out of gravel, they are turning to Tooele Valley.

“We have a lot of pressure on us to permit some more gravel operations that would use Mormon Trail Road,” he said. “Certainly gravel trucks are carrying heavy loads and they do have a significant impact on roads, particularly roads that weren’t build to carry that load.”

Hurst said he just recently became aware of another hauler that will be using Mormon Trail Road.

“Most of them are hauling out of those pits and going either over to SR 36. Harpers and Geneva typically go to 36 and right down Main Street,” he said. “But we have Hadco’s hauling out of a pit and they’re right on the Mormon Trail. Now they’ve got LTI Trucking Company hauling south and going into Lehi out of that same Hadco pit. So we’re going to have to put some weight restrictions on and we’re going to ask them rather than going south on Mormon Trail to go north into Grantsville and get on 138 because we’ve already spent a lot of money on that road.”

Rod Thompson, director of the Tooele County Roads Department, said they put a temporary 25 ton weight limit on the Mormon Trail Road yesterday on the road south from Box Elder Canyon Road to SR-199.

“It’s temporary and probably won’t last longer than two weeks,” he said, adding electronic message boards will alert drivers of the weight limit. “There’s a critical time when the road is most vulnerable to damage in the spring and that time is now.”

Loveless said the county has investigated ways to generate money to fix the road, including permitting of extraction or hauling, impact fees as new gravel pits become permitted, reducing the speed limit and — as a stop-gap measure — milling the asphalt surface back to a gravel road.

Hurst said they’ve looked at instituting a tippage or tonnage fee on trucks using the road, though he said the more the county looks into those the less likely it looks that can happen legally.

“These trucks are paying their gas tax and so what they will indicate is, ‘Hey, we’re already paying road tax,’” he said, adding while the county does get B and C road funds, it’s a minor amount and not enough to do a lot of road rebuilding.

“Seventy percent of that gravel is going to Salt Lake County,” Hurst added. “So we’re not getting a lot of revenue. That was our goal is to get some revenue coming into Tooele County to rebuild these roads that are being impacted.”

Loveless said they’re still a couple years out from improving the road.

“We hope that we can maintain a safe road until we can get it repaired,” he said. “I think it’s an important corridor and an important road. We only have two ways to get south out of this valley. One is 36 and the other is Mormon Trail Road. We have quite a few commuters that go to Dugway, and most of us have learned the shortest way to southern Utah is down 36 going south instead of over to Salt Lake.”

Sarah Miley: swest@tooeletranscript.com