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Carroll County officials outline plan to study and prepare Stafford Ridge Road widening
Summary
Speaker 3 proposed studying and preparing bids to widen roughly 2.65 miles of Stafford Ridge Road to improve safety and support growing traffic, asking staff to pursue engineering assessments, sample borings and consultant scopes ahead of possible 2026 work.
Speaker 3 urged the court to move ahead with planning to widen Stafford Ridge Road, saying the narrow existing roadway — often 12½ to 15 feet — is increasingly unsafe as new housing and truck traffic arrive. “One of the most important things that they have on their mind is roads,” Speaker 3 said, arguing the county must consider more than a fresh asphalt surface and should build a proper road base where needed.
Speaker 3 said he submitted a request for $300,000 in the spring budget for District 3 and identified a roughly $150,000 line item related to road work, and recommended beginning with targeted investigations: test borings or samples to determine existing pavement and base, an inventory of culverts, and a consultant-prepared bid package. He described several approaches — limited excavation and base-building for widened shoulders, soliciting bids from contractors with engineering specifications, or a fuller, more expensive “full-depth reclamation” option used elsewhere that rebuilds a road base from scratch and can extend a pavement’s useful life to 15+ years.
Other members and residents raised safety and emergency-access concerns. Speaker 9 and Speaker 1 warned that narrow stretches can impede fire, EMS and routine traffic and urged clarity about how wide the rebuilt sections should be. Staff and participants discussed tradeoffs — a standardized width (for example, 15–16 feet) simplifies bidding but may be impossible at constrained locations and could require engineered allowances. Several participants recommended hiring an engineering consultant to develop a clear scope so contractors can bid without excessive change orders.
Speaker 3 asked staff to obtain more cost estimates and to contact two or three engineering firms for proposals, with the intention of having an actionable plan and bid documents in time for 2026 paving work. The court requested a copy of Speaker 3’s presentation and agreed to follow up on consultant scope and specification options.
Next steps recorded in the meeting: staff were asked to solicit engineering proposals, perform limited field sampling to establish subsurface conditions, inventory culverts and affected utilities, and return with a recommendation and cost estimates before issuing formal construction bids.
