Wagon Trail Project Runs into Financial Rut

SAN ANDREAS – The long-awaited Wagon Trail project, which would straighten a six-mile section of Highway 4 between Copperopolis and Angels Camp, is too expensive to complete in the next decade.

Instead, Calaveras County Public Works Director Tom Garcia on Wednesday night proposed to straighten only two miles of the highway by 2016.

Engineers now estimate the full Wagon Trail project will cost $70 million to $80 million, or roughly twice the roughly $40 million previously estimated.

That’s a problem, because $40 million is all that county officials expect to be able to fund, and that is thanks only to a three-county partnership with Alpine and Amador counties in which the partnership pools highway funding over a decade.

The partnership’s plans for the next decade also call for funding a fix for a congested section of Highway 88 in Pine Grove, in Amador County, and that project appears likely to cost roughly $83 million, far more than the $40 million the three-county agreement proposed.

“We can’t deliver both projects the way they are scoped,” Garcia said Wednesday to the board of directors of the Calaveras Council of Governments, which serves as the county’s transportation planning agency.

Instead, Garcia is urging the board and transportation agencies to phase in the Wagon Trail project, completing the design and purchasing the right of way for the entire project but building only the two miles from Copperopolis to about where the highway meets Pool Station Road.

“It’s not as contentious,” Garcia said of that first stretch.

Also, Garcia said he believes that first section can be completed for $10 million to $15 million, an amount that the pooled funding agreement should be able to handle by 2016.

The Wagon Trail project is so named because the highway in the area follows the path of a historic wagon road dating to the Gold Rush. As a result, tight turns and undulating grades slow traffic to as little as 30 mph.

Regional leaders want a modern, 65 mph highway to speed motorists east to major tourism destinations such as the wineries in Murphys and the Bear Valley ski resort.

By completing the design work, doing environmental studies and buying right of way for the full project, Calaveras would be poised to complete it when new funding comes available, Garcia said.

“Would that be considered a shovel-ready project?” asked Tom Tryon, who is both a Calaveras County supervisor and a member of the Council of Governments board.

“Yes it would,” Garcia said.

Contact reporter Dana M. Nichols at (209) 607-1361 or dnichols@recordnet.com. Visit his blog at recordnet.com/calaverasblog.