Manitou Springs strikes delicate balance with bridge funding, repair, replacement

MANITOU SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - An inspection last year found that the town of Manitou Springs has 11 bridges in poor condition.

But the situation may not be as dire as you'd think.

Roy Chaney, the public works director, said that those structures are actually culverts because they don't meet the minimum 20-foot length definition to be a bridge, and they generally cross streams or creeks.

"We have just two (actual) bridges in town," he said. "The bigger bridges through town are CDOT [Colorado Department of Transportation] bridges."

The situation requires the town to perform a constant balancing act between repairing culverts or replacing them. A small town like this one has even more limited funding for bridges than bigger cities such as Colorado Springs or Pueblo.

Officials are closely monitoring the culvert on Serpentine Drive at the west end of town.

The culvert crosses Fountain Creek, below Rainbow Falls, and officials said that a wall on the downstream side -- called a wing wall -- is cracking.

Serpentine Drive gets a steady amount of traffic between US 24 and downtown.

Crews have even placed concrete barriers along the wall to protect traffic, but Chaney said that the culvert doesn't need to be replaced -- yet.

"That was a privately-owned bridge," he explained. "We have the bridge now. The city has, over the last couple of years, worked on getting responsibility for that bridge, so that we can also do repairs as part of the Creek Walk trail program. So, currently, the wing wall is a problem, and we're going to address that this fall."

Even in poor condition, Chaney said that culvert, and ten others, remain safe to drive on but eventually will need repairs or even replacement.

We'll know more after the next regular inspection two years from now.

In the past eight years, crews have repaired four culverts and replaced three; the town tries to do a repair or a replacement every year or two.

A repair can cost around $50,000 but a replacement can cost ten times more.

"If we can line some culverts and not replace the bridge because it's not needed, we can do many more bridges than just the one per year or every two years," Chaney said. "It would be a liner product, just like you line pipes. It's a product that gets lined up almost like a pipe within a pipe."

Some of the town's parking revenue funds bridge maintenance and repair.