By VERNON ROBISON
Moapa Valley Progress
A group of Logandale residents are complaining about an ongoing dust problem in their neighborhood. Residents along the north side of Whipple addressed the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board (MVTAB) on Wednesday night about clouds of thick dust issuing from a designated ATV trail that runs east and west along Whipple in front of their homes.
“I know in this county that construction projects and other developments are carefully regulated on the dust that they create,” said Sandy Cameron who lives on Stratton Street, just adjacent to the ATV trail. “But we are living with a serious dust problem that is much worse than any construction site would be allowed to do.”
Sandy and her husband Bruce Cameron recently moved to their home on Stratton and immediately noticed this major problem. Bruce explained that young people speed along the trail on ATVs at high speeds kicking up huge clouds of dust.
“We can be sitting out on the porch in the backyard and all of a sudden a huge plume of dust rises up over the fence and covers the whole back yard,” Bruce Cameron said. “It is almost intolerable.”
The couple brought a petition signed by about 20 other neighbors in the area asking for something to be done about it.
The Camerons proposed that one solution would be to pave the trail between Paiute Street and State Highway 169.
Bruce said that he had noticed that a county flood control project was being planned to direct flood waters down Whipple and eventually into the river channel. He said it would make sense to add the trail paving on to that project.
“It seems like that would be a good time to do it when all the equipment is there and they will most likely be paving anyway,” Bruce Cameron said.
But MVTAB chairman Gene Houston said that this proposal might be a longer term fix than what the Camerons anticipate.
“That project was in planning when I came on the town board more than 20 years ago,” Houston said. “I’m not sure that it will ever be done in my lifetime. It may never get done.”
Houston suggested that the paving project be added to the community’s paving list. But he warned that this would likely also be a long wait. He pointed out that there is already a lengthy list of paving items; and items are only completed as funding becomes available.
MVTAB member Brian Burris suggested that the small trail project might be added to any larger paving projects that might be completed along the way. In that case, it might not be completed all at once, but only here and there as materials and manpower are available, he said.
Burris also noted that the ATV trail had originally been constructed with palliative dust control material being placed over the soil of the trail to mitigate such problems. That material would only last for a few months and then would need to be replaced.
“It seems like some of this problem might be helped if the trail was just put on a maintenance list to replace that material every so often,” Burris said.
