RBC I A grant for more than $100,000 to be used for signage and mapping of Wagon Wheel OHV (Off Highway Vehicles) East Trails System was submitted to Colorado State Parks by the Rio Blanco County board of commissioners this month.
“The county will be the fiscal agent in the beginning,” Commissioner Shawn Bolton said. “We have letters of support from the BLM (Bureau of Land Management), the U.S. Forest Service, both towns, the county and the snowmobile club. The Forest Service also submitted a grant for trail maintenance and we wrote a letter in support of their grant.”
The commissioners will hold a public meeting ?? to discuss a resolution allowing OHVs to travel on designated county roads at speeds no more than 35 mph. The Town of Rangely has allowed OHVs to travel on designated streets to access trails for several years and Meeker trustees recently approved a similar ordinance. The county’s resolution will be available for review at www.co.rio-blanco.co.us/commissioners.
Bolton said the resolution will designate parts of RBC Road 8 (the upriver road), RBC Road 13 (Flag Creek Road) across the mesa and RBC Road 15 (Thornburg Road) to be used by OHVs to access roads and trails.
The county has been working with USFS trails supervisor Ron Taussig to map existing roads and trails in the area.
The BLM will conduct a road inventory on the west end of the county, which should be completed next year, before the Wagon Wheel OHV Trail System is extended to the western end of Rio Blanco County.
“We’ll work on this end next summer and go to the other end the following summer,” Bolton said at the meeting held in Meeker.
Bolton said the all OHVs would require a state parks sticker at a cost of $25 and agriculture would be exempt from the resolution. “They can still do as they do,” Bolton said of current agriculture use.
In other business, the commissioners approved contracts with Visual Lease Services and Value West Inc., for 2012. The two companies assist the county assessor’s office in locating and mapping all pipelines and gas and oil locations in the county and provide maps for county use.
The commissioners also approved two change orders from Building by Design for the new 4-H building at the Rio Blanco County Fairgrounds, bringing the total cost of the building to $464,228.
