OURAY – Ouray County, in an agreement with the Colorado Department of Transportation, will receive approximately $166,000 in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to build eight to 10 wildlife ramps on U.S. Highway 550 north of Ridgway.

County Administrator Connie Hunt, who spent most of Monday morning at a meeting on the stimulus project, said the county had originally applied for a transportation enhancement grant through CDOT to build the wildlife ramps but, as it turns out, the project qualified for federal stimulus funds.

“As we were moving along on it, CDOT came back and said [our project] was eligible for stimulus funds, and it was,” Hunt said. “Now we are a part of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act by entering into an [Intergovernmental Agreement] with CDOT for the money. We are now going forward in designing the ramps and the project will hopefully be put out to bid sometime late this summer.”

There are already two wildlife ramps built near the Ridgway State Park but Hunt said the new ramps will enhance safety on a road that is well known for its high number of wildlife collisions, particularly involving deer.

“They are going to be designed a little better than what is already there,” Hunt said. “It will help wildlife get off the highway. It is a safety issue for the traveling public and also for the wildlife.”

Hunt said she hopes the project will be finished this fall and that it will provide jobs to contractors in the region.

“We would like to get the project going this fall,” she said. “But with all the recording requirements for stimulus dollars it may not happen. If we can’t [begin] this fall it could happen by late spring/early summer. We want to put local people to work but we have to bid it out with the requirements under CDOT. The point is to put people within the region to work.”

The project was discussed at Monday’s Ouray Board of County Commissioners meeting where two of the commissioners expressed some frustration over the selection of the project to receive stimulus funds. Earlier this year, the commissioners wanted to get stimulus money into the county for projects other than highway improvements, like local infrastructure street projects, but since none of them were “shovel ready” they weren’t eligible for recovery act funds. According to Commissioner Keith Meinert, because the wildlife project is basically ready to go and it is a CDOT project, it was selected.

“I think the difference is that it was a project that was on CDOT’s books,” Meinert said at Monday’s meeting. “The projects we were thinking about were not on CDOT’s books. They could fill in their portfolio of projects that are as little as $160,000. For us to go directly to the feds with proposals to put a few one hundred thousand dollars toward road repairs would not have been noticed. The fact that this was under CDOT enabled it to go forward.”

And since Commissioner Hunt was in charge of applying for the original grant money from CDOT, she is now expected to be the county’s representative for the ARRA-funded project. Hunt told the commissioners that Colorado is one of 16 states to be audited throughout the stimulus funding and there will be a lot of accountability for the projects that accept stimulus funds. Commissioner Heidi Albritton expressed frustration with the selection process and that a large portion of Hunt’s time will now have to be dedicated to the project as the county’s representative.

“I am aggravated,” she said. “Out of all things, this is what we got as it panned out. It was something we were willing to put up [highway improvement grant] and now our staff is stuck with attending meeting after meeting. The recording is significant. If we had known the level of commitment we would have to step forward with, I would have lobbied to say ‘no,’ I don’t think it’s worth it.”

Hunt said that while the project will take a lot of her time, it will be beneficial to the county to learn the stimulus funding process so they are better equipped in the future.

“It may be a good learning [experience] so we are geared up to purse bigger stimulus grants,” Hunt said, with the other commissioners generally agreeing. “There is some positive that will come out of this.”

Though Albritton agreed that the project will provide “good experience for other things,” she said she has a “philosophical fur ball in my throat about stimulus funding right now.”