Paving on Mount Gilead Road

Here's an interesting article from yesterday's Washington Post about road paving on Mount Gilead Road.

According to the Post, maintenance crews repaired a small stretch of pavement on Mount Gilead Road west of Leesburg last week.

"It was a minor affair, by road maintenance standards -- a job that cost $15,000 at most, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Transportation said. But the work reignited a dispute over the winding country road that three years ago pitted neighbor against neighbor and became a symbol of the contentious debate over growth in Loudoun County."

The Post article added that "Mike P. Salmon, a VDOT spokesman, said last week's work was necessary to fix a drainage problem. But some residents are saying that it's too soon to send crews back to the short section of Mount Gilead that was paved in 2005 after a bitter fight before the Loudoun Board of Supervisors. The paving was proposed in 2004 by two Mount Gilead residents who said the rutted gravel road posed a safety hazard. The proposal was criticized by several of their neighbors, who said that the danger was exaggerated and that a smoother surface would ruin the road's country feel and hasten development."

"The board sided with those who favored paving but agreed to limit it to a short stretch where a majority of residents had said they supported it. So, using a portion of Loudoun's transportation allocation, VDOT paved less than a mile of the four-mile road."

Got a thought on the paving job? Live on Mount Gilead Road? Let us know what you think.