After more than three years of using blogging to communicate with interested parties, I am moving my comments to my new Facebook page, "Commissioner Don Boggs". The page has already been well received with 450 friends after a week going live. I can reach many more people, especially residents of the precinct, more efficiently than with a blog. I already have received requests from constituants in the first week. So, please go to the page or send me a friend request. See ya there!

It's been two and a half months since I've updated this blog and I can't say anyone has missed anything exciting. I doesn't take long to become bored reading about cutting a jillion trees. We have made a significant purchase along with partners Precinct # 2 and Precinct # 3 of a bucket truck so that we can take down large trees in a smaller area much more safely. By comparison to a tree service, we paid for the cost of the used truck on the third day of use!
Once a month, we are sure to go through the entire precinct and shovel patch each road that shows damage from wear or the rain. Rain damage has decreased significantly after we became focused on the ditches two years ago. Our dig-outs have been few and far between and becoming more infrequent.
The rainy weather has created many calls about installing culverts. We have installed crossings for Mr Koeninger on CR 1540, for Mr. Whitehurst on CR 1432, and we are planning a large install of two, 48inch in diameter x 48 feet long culverts that are badly needed across CR 1362.
The rest of our time has been spent pulling ditches with the motor grader. For the last two years we have been using a leased excavator for this job, but the leasing company SOLD our excavator. How dare them! I guess it is all about the money. LOL The motor grader is doing a good job and we have already finished work on CR 1695, CR 1697, CR 1475, and CR 1670. Again, the Dig-tess marking contractor and ATT are not too fond of Precinct # 1. Oh, well.
By the way, I am itching to get out campaigning but since I don't have an election race until November, I have been advised by some of my supporters to let this primary determine my opponent before I begin. I always heard that only a fool ignores friendly advice.

The campaign season has begun and candidates have signed up to run for the commissioner of Precinct #1. I plan to keep things civil and just talk about my abilities and my accomplishments, not about any real or perceived shortcomings of my opponent. Also, I will use any quotes by my opponent only in the context for which they were intended. As for the road crew, we continue to cut trees. We were fortunate to partner with Kenny Hawkins at AEP and Greg Russell at Bowie-Cass on many trees that were close to or would involve power lines. Their contractors trimmed the trees under the lines and we would then take them to the ground. Many thanks to those who helped us get this done.
We installed a culvert for Mr. Marcentel on CR 1364 and installed a culvert on CR 1317 across the road, replacing a badly corroded one. Much time has been spent on small jobs as we try to negotiate the remaining vacation time for the employees. Maintenance of the equipment, straightening the shop, etc. have been done during December while the crew got in their deer hun.., I mean their vacation time in. We badly need to shovel patch next week if we get some dry weather. We did do some late season scabbing on CR 1360 and CR1361. CR 1695 also had some places that we scabbed due to heavy truck traffic. The rest of the time was spent doing what we've been doing since September; cutting Red Oaks and pine trees.

It's strangely comforting to have a couple of co-workers/ friends give me a hard time about up-dating my blog. You see, I type these blog reports and it seems as if they go out on the web and nobody reads them. I have not gotten many comments or interaction with followers, so, now I know, at least I have a few followers!
The time worked since my last blog has been busy but not very exciting. We finished our major projects this summer and we have been doing some spot scabbing some minor problem areas. We did some scabbing on CR 1345, CR 1468, CR 1450, CR 1465, and CR 1540. Those were all in the middle section of Precinct #1. We always have some scabbing to do on the Old Paris Rd, CR 1200. We also went to the east side of Tankersly on a very narrow road CR 1124 and scabbed a portion of the road for those residents. CR 1220 was also addressed after the gophers had a field day this summer under the pavement.
We always need to take a few days to a week to "shovel patch" the whole precinct. That was done from September 20 to the 23 and again from November 7 to the 10.
The entire rest of the last two and a half months has been spent cutting dead red oaks and pine trees in the precinct. We have cut no less that one hundred trees, some skinny saplings to behemoth oaks. Our burn pile will be photographed for posterity. It is huge!! As I said during court on Monday, if and when we light it, the space station will report a siting! As I sit here typing this blog, I'm hoping the forecasters are right about the large rainfall expected this evening.

Since we finished our effort to rebuild and/or clean out the ditches over all the precinct, we have really worked hard on resurfacing and scabbing our roads over the west and central sections of the precinct. We started off in June with a complete patching effort over the entire precinct so we could have the time to spend on needed projects this summer. We started on CR1475 where so much ditching had been done. From there we went to CR1362 and repaired several spots with scabs. That road has almost no base, as I have mentioned before, and what base it has is what we have put in during our repairs. Anyway, our work drew two thumbs up from Gayla Dodd, a resident on that road.
We then stopped and sprayed the grass and weeds at bridge railings, intersections and blind corners that we had cut down three weeks earlier and again this year, we got a 100% kill at those locations. Our biggest concerns in precinct one are the highly traveled roads like CR1200, CR 1905, CR 1670 and CR 1635. We began to extend the repairs to CR1200 made last year by a considerable amount, completing almost two miles of new pavement. I think that next year, we will have resurfaced all of the "haul road" portion of CR1200 and most of the other.
We started then on the overlay of the road that Luminant built and donated to the county. It was in serious disrepair after only one year and I asked Luminant for some financial assistance on the expense of an overlay. They agreed and we ran a continuous pavement for 1.4 miles from US271 Bus to FM 2152. It turned out very good, thanks to my talented and hard working crew, and Jeff Parchman at Gerhart Excavating even agreed to keep his dirt trucks off of the soft pavement for two or three weeks while the pavement cured. Unfortunately, somebody realized that we had built a fantastic drag-strip and scarred it up. Ugh!
We had a pretty bad wind storm about this time and spent a good deal of both daytime and night-time getting trees off the roads. But by the beginning of July, the heat was severe and a great time to use a cheap paving method we found in 2009. We take the recycled asphalt that we get from the state for their shared materials program, ie. free, windrow it down the road, let the sun heat it up to 100 deg or more, oil it and mix the heck out of it, then lay it down on the existing pavement as an overlay. Now, it not appropriate for our highly traveled roads but for out-of the-way places where traffic is light, we find that it works well and only costs us the price of the oil. We began on CR 1490, where only one house is at the end of the road. It hadn't been worked on in many years and needed it badly. We then went to CR 1635, CR 1435 and CR 1455 and scabbed several places. From ther we went to CR1360 (Daphnes Prairie road) and put that special mix on over a mile of road. With last year and this year's effort, we should complete that portion of road, that has not been resurfaced in twenty-five years, next year.
6T Ranch purchased some land along CR1550 and was rebuilding a fence. We were able to slip in front of their fence builders and pull a good scallopped ditch the entire length thanks to Mgr. Chad Parrish of the 6-T. We are now working our recycling project on CR 1680 at JR's Bottom and hope to upgrade that mess considerably.
In a side note, the negotiations on the Constuction Management Contract for the loop project is just about completed, and hopefully, we can begin pushing dirt in October.

We have now completed our ditch work for 2011. We still have more to do in the eastern third of the precinct, but the excavator was a rental and we sent it back May 26th so we could get started on some chores and a complete patching of the precinct. We completed CR's 1450 and 1452, parts of CR 1635, and parts of CR 1660. We installed culverts for Mr Taylor on CR 1780, Mr. Martin on CR 1345, for the county on CR 1680 and also for the county on CR 1317. We have also trimmed the early grass around the bridges, culverts and intersections and will come back in three weeks to spray the regrowth. That method has worked well for us for the last two years.
We have plans to patch CR 1400 before we begin our complete overlay. This is the road that was given to the county by Luminant and has been a problem ever since. We are partnering with Luminant to bring that road into county specs. We also plan to do extensive scabbing on CR 1475 and on CR 1362.

No big whoop since my last post..., except the most important work that we've done for the future of our roads in Precinct 1. We have been doing major ditch cleaning throughout the month of February and so far in March. People in the precinct are surprised and sometimes upset with the way the ditches were designed to look like and function. Every "old school" road man has told me that no matter how much asphalt or cold mix you put on a road, it won't last long if your ditches allow water to stand at base level or roll down the road instead of into the ditch. We have done parts of CR 1475 and CR 1465 in the Bridges Chapel area. Then we moved to the end of the Old Paris Road and worked the curve back to CR 1350. From there we moved to both ends of CR 1345. We also worked the frequently traveled CR 1317 between Hwy 271 Bus. and Hwy 271 By-pass. We just finished the East end of CR 1535 and will be moving to CR 1450 and CR 1452. I've been told people have given me the nickname "Ditch Don". Understanding the importance of this effort, I answer to it proudly. Precinct 1's crew should be commended for their efforts as well.
We also have spent about a week in February patching some badly damaged road from the snows we had this winter. Culverts were installed on CR 1468 for Mr Coil, on CR 1350 for Ms. Cole, on CR 1046 for Ms. Hendricks and we are going to fix a culvert on CR 1315 this week.
I know many are concerned about the selection of Pate Transportation by the selection committee ( Jerry Boatner, Darrell Grubbs, Mike Fields, Mike Ahrens and me). Let me say that we have been doing every thing we can to follow rather strict guidelines set forth by TxDot. The committee is working as a committee generally works, unpredicably.