Marquette County Road Commission adjusting to pandemic

ISHPEMING — The Marquette County Road Commission has been doing a lot of adjusting of day–to–day operations in order to overcome the recent winter storm and the COVID–19 outbreak.

The storm caused the road commission to bring in extra temporary workers who were recently sent home because of the coronavirus.

The Marquette County Road Commission wishes to follow social distancing protocols as much as possible and that prolongs road work such as plowing.

“We had a lot of issues with mailboxes getting hit,” said Jim Iwanic, Engineer Manager at the Marquette County Road Commission.” Obviously when we have wet, heavy snow and its coming off of our plows, we do wipeout a lot of mailboxes. For this snow storm, we changed our policy a little bit to say if anybody had a hit mail box, we’d just replace it with no questions asked.”

Since the Marquette County Road Commission’s funds are determined by when people register their vehicles and when they put gas in them, all summer projects have been put on hold until the pandemic has calmed down.

The Road Commission originally planned back in October of 2019 to do 1.7 million dollars worth of paving and crack sealing this summer before the COVID-19 outbreak occurred.