Commissioner Garry Marchman shovels a tar/gravel mix into a pothole on one of Cullman County’s roads earlier this month. / Cullman County, Delores Clark
CULLMAN COUNTY – The Cullman County Commission (CCC) spends a lot of its time dealing with the county’s road system. It requires attention, personnel, planning and money . . . lots of money. But for Commissioner Garry Marchman, sometimes all it takes is a shovel.
A photo began circulating on social media recently, showing Marchman shoveling a tar/gravel mix into a pothole on one of Cullman County’s roads. Some think it was a staged photo op or a symbolic gesture, but it turned out to be the real deal. This was not the first time Marchman has patched a pothole, nor, apparently, will it be the last. The Tribune sat down with the commissioner to find out just what he’s doing, and to get a brief update on county road projects.
“About once a week I’ll go to the road department and get a little bit of what they call ‘cold mix,’ and I’ll put it on the back of my truck,” said Marchman. “I keep a shovel on there; you can go look at my truck right now–there’s a shovel there now, and you’ll see where cold mix has been. When I’m out, and there’s maybe one pothole on a road that’s a pretty good road, and I can throw a little cold mix in it, and I can pull over to a safe spot–I don’t do it in a curve or anything like that, because I’m by myself–I can repair it myself, and I don’t have to send a crew of four or five people around to fix that hole.
“Or if I’ve got people out patching in another part of the county, and there’s a bad hole that somebody identifies, then I try to go out and throw a little cold mix in it. When I get calls in that area that people want to talk to me or see me, when I’m out, I try to just be efficient and do a little bit. It’s not a whole lot, you know, but I try to do a little bit.
“I’ve been doing that pretty much since I’ve been in office,” recalled the commissioner. “I guess I just hadn’t publicized it or anything. I don’t make a big deal of it; it’s really not a big deal. You’ll drive down these roads, and you’ll have one pothole right where you drive; and everybody hits it. That’s the pothole I try to fix. Make a small difference is all I want to do.”
At the time of the meeting, Marchman was not sure of the location where the photo was taken, but thought it was around the Logan community.
He shared, “I didn’t even know the photograph was taken until it hit the Facebook page.”
Update on county roadwork
Marchman shared a list of county roads that have been targeted for resurfacing projects in 2017:
Road number District Length in miles
48 2 1.1
105 2 0.5
109 2 4.7
222 2 4.9 (federally funded)
393 2 0.2
394 2 .25
453 2 0.9
709 4 0.7
715 4 1.0
726 4 0.5
946 1 2.7
1107 1 1.4
1189 1 0.3
1332 3 1.0
1339 3 3.6 (federally funded)
1354 3 2.5
1421 3 0.2
1524 3 1.4
1541 3 1.3
1542 3 1.0
1552 3 0.3
Organizing road projects
The commissioner knows that an occasional shovel load of cold mix isn’t going to fix the county’s road problems. For this reason, he is helping set up a program to organize road information and identify priority needs.
“I told people when I first came into office,” said Marchman, “that one of my projects was going to be to establish a plan. No matter what we do, we are a lot of times fighting fires, and we’re not being proactive about what we do, and we’re not planning. You end up falling into the system where you’re answering calls and you’re putting out fires. That’s not the way we need to operate.”
Noting that the county lacks an organized file containing numbers of gravel, paved and chip sealed roads, and that no program exists to identify those roads most dangerously close to failure, the commissioner explained the commission’s new County Information Management System (CIMS). The new program will help him and the road department identify and prioritize needs, in order to get on top of existing road problems and become proactive in preventing future issues.
Marchman concluded, “One of the things I think is important is that we’ve got to focus on our major roads, getting them to where they need to be. That’s one thing I’ve worked on. And we’ve also got to focus on good management.”
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