A winding road in Southeast Grays Harbor County will soon change course, cutting through a sheep pasture to provide smoother travel for passing log trucks and cars.

Construction crews from Rognlins, Inc., will break ground this week on Garrard Creek Road, near Oakville, and lay nearly 3,000 feet of new pavement over the course of the next 10 weeks.

From its intersection with Oakville Road, Garrard Creek Road currently rolls Southwest about five miles through timber and private land before breaking sharply left, then right, hugging a barn, and meeting Brooklyn Road. Once the project is finished, the road will instead punch through the brush a few hundred feet north of the barn and continue straight before gliding left through a grass field.

That will allow traffic to pass at a suggested limit of 35 mph instead of several consecutive 20 mph curves.

The project, designed by the Grays Harbor County Public Works Division, will cost about $1.5 million to complete, most of which is funded with state fuel tax dollars, and the rest with the county’s budgeted road fund.

In 2015 the county received a $1.3 million grant from the Rural Arterial Program, which draws from a $40 million biennial fund generated from the state’s 49 cent tax on each gallon of gas. The tax is paid to distributors and passed on to consumers, according to the Department of Revenue.

The Washington County Road Administration Board divides these funds between five regions across the state based on land area and miles of rural roads. Grays Harbor County maintains 500 miles of “rural” roads, about half of which are classified as arterial shipping routes. That number is similar to neighboring, competing counties in Southwest Washington

The state Legislature set up the fund in the 1980s after many railroads were abandoned, leaving rural roads to take the brunt of heavy shipping traffic, and in need of more money for reconstruction. Garrard Creek Road is a main artery between the Interstate 5 corridor and heavy public and private timberlands, including the state Department of Natural Resource’s Lower Chehalis State Forest.

Engineer John Becker began his employment with Grays Harbor County in 2015, around the time the county landed grant funds for the project. He said he couldn’t recall working on another road realignment project of this scale since joining the county.

When he first started working on designs for the project, the writing was on the wall — the county already owned the right-of-way to a strip of land through the field. It also turned out to be the route that complied with environmental constructions, like streams and wetlands, he said.

But a few years later, when the project’s environmental consultant cruised through on her bicycle one day, she noticed something was different: a beaver had clogged a nearby stream, spreading water over the pasture, and the planned route.

With plans already in place and no feasible way around the wetlands, the county purchased wetland bank credits. Like carbon credits for excess polluters, public or private entities can buy wetland credits to offset “unavoidable” harm to wetlands. Any damage to wetlands at the Garrard Creek project were mitigated by supporting the Chehalis Basin Wetland Mitigation Bank — a 177-acre wetland site in Lewis County, which is being restored by the TransAlta Corporation under administration of the Washington Department of Ecology and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

With the wetland issue solved, the final piece of pre-construction means securing full access for the project. The county already had the right-of-way through the sheep pasture, but needed the same for the new Brooklyn Road intersection, which will be several feet west of where it stands now. After failing to secure right-of-way at first, the county advertised eminent domain procedure earlier this year, but ultimately reached an agreement with the landowner before that was necessary.

Once finished, Becker said, the old windy road will likely be turned into an access road for local property owners. Construction should finish by the end of September, Becker said.

Contact reporter Clayton Franke at 406-552-3917 or clayton.franke@thedailyworld.com.