By Zach Jensen,
It’s been more than 15 years since Cheri Lane spoke with the Winneshiek County Board of Supervisors about the dust and traffic on the road where she and her family lives and since then, the problems plaguing Whitetail Road haven’t improved.
Lane and fellow Whitetail Road resident Mark Van der Linden addressed the supervisors during their Dec. 4 regular meeting – hoping to get relief from the road’s high traffic and often-unsettling dust. Whitetail Road stretches 1.6 miles between Quarry Hill Road and Clay Hill Road – northwest of Freeport and northeast of Decorah. Lane said that stretch of road averages 206 vehicles per day and is home to 24 residents.
“When we were new in town, with a young family, we, of course, were concerned about the safety of the road, because it’s one of the busiest and most-heavily-traveled county roads in Winneshiek County,” Lane said. “We’ve lived there 28 years, and when I was kind of new, I remember … I got inspired to start conversations to hopefully improve the safety, because with that much traveling on the road, it’s used by a lot of people who are taking shortcuts. My goal, as a young mother, was to have a safer road for my children.”
Lane’s discussion with the supervisors stems from a Nov. 7 letter to the county in which Lane and Van der Linden state the Iowa Department of Natural Resources (DNR) found the road’s “traffic volume to be ‘very high,’ and noted it far exceeded the threshold required to trigger mandatory fugitive dust mitigation under Iowa law.” Online resources define fugitive dust as “dust that is not emitted from a specific point source.”
The letter also cited that in 2020, Winneshiek County Sheriff’s Office deputies “drove the road and indicated that they would not be comfortable conducting traffic stops due to safety concerns with the reduced visibility.”
Full article in the December 7 Public Opinion Newspaper.
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