County exploring with the right people
Written for the Marshall Advisor-Chronicle, published Nov. 16, 2019
At 6 a.m., the Calhoun County Road Department garage is as busy as it will be all day. Forty-nine road workers gather in a room full of picnic tables to receive updates from Kori Albrecht, CCRD's Operations Director, and other Road Department supervisors. Once they receive assignments, road workers are on their way, spreading out across Calhoun County and getting a myriad of jobs done.
The day Kori Albrecht toured road projects with me, rain was forecasted. That affected the work assignments given. Kori told me, for instance, you wouldn't want to scrape gravel before rain and turn the road to mud. Instead, work like this was exchanged for deberming, patching potholes, and maintaining washouts that take place at the edge of road. There are certain areas of the county where the road department keeps track and maintains the road edge to avoid it washing out.
How someone accrues as much knowledge as Kori Albrecht has about Calhoun County roads is a mystery to me. I asked him if there's a road he doesn't know, and he said, "At this point, probably not." He's lived in this county his whole life—in Battle Creek, in Marshall now, and maybe one day in a rural township. He started 20 years ago when what's now the Road Department was the Road Commission, starting as a mechanic and now leading all operations. Much of the work he oversees, he's done himself.
In one of the red trucks that is equipped with radios, I heard chatter between road workers moving equipment or from the front office finding solutions. Kori drove us over recently chip-sealed roads in the couple of townships we traveled through. At the time with chip-sealing projects happening countywide, Kori received questions about why the road department fixed roads that were paved in the last few years. He said, "Asphalt is so expensive these days that it costs more to repave a road than it costs to take preservation measures in the short term."
Kori was most proud to talk about the bridge maintenance program that began this year. We visited a bridge on Pine Lake Road in Pennfield Township where the surface was recently replaced. There is a list of bridge maintenance projects being performed before the end of the season. Two deck replacements and several HMA surface replacements are complete. Kori told me deck replacements are a straight-forward way to improve bridge infrastructure—the foundation of the bridge is sound but the platform where cars drive every day can be replaced.
What I liked best, as simple as it is, was boom mowing. We caught a road worker just as he put down his "Tree Work Ahead" sign and got back into the boom mower to mow the sides of the road. Kori insisted that we stand far away because sometimes that round blade can whip back rocks. They don't run the boom mower in front of houses, Kori said. We had our neon Radwear vests on and watched from the truck until the mower was further away. The light was beautiful through the canopy of trees, and with swift power, it whipped away weeds and anything in the right-of-way.
As we rode back to the Road Department garage, I asked Kori what his favorite part of the county is. He said he didn't have one. Then he said he couldn't pick one. Then he told me everything he loves about the different parts of the County—he likes the hills in Bedford, the farms on F Drive in Eckford Township, farms around Homer Township, and more that I don't remember. As a county employee, I tend to see Calhoun County as a whole rather than three separate cities and 19 townships. For that reason, I love talking to Kori because in the impressive, passionate work he does, he covers Calhoun County from Bedford to Homer Townships. "Every season proposes something different that piques my interest," Kori said.
