Dalton Gardens ordinance prevents streets used as commercial conduit

Dalton Gardens ordinance prevents streets from use as commercial conduit

The roads are taking a beating.

That is how Dalton Gardens council member Ray Craft puts it.

What Craft calls roads are streets by other standards. But here in Dalton Gardens, a community that vehemently defends its rural flavor, the checkerboard network is used equally by bicycles, horses and pedestrians as they idle past open tracts of an acre or more, some of it fenced for livestock, others a haven for deer.

So, the description is as good as any.

Beginning next week, the town’s routes will be off limits to commercial vehicles.

“It was 100 percent unanimous,” Dalton Gardens Mayor Dan Edwards said.

Everyone on the council, in a recent vote, opted to close the community’s streets to commercial trucks weighing over 26,000 pounds that use Dalton Garden thoroughfares to get somewhere else.

“A lot of them are going to Hayden … using our streets as a shortcut,” Craft said. “Or they drive through Dalton from Highway 95 to get to I-90.”

Either way, trucks are putting a strain on the town’s streets, causing them to buckle and crack and the pavement to crumble. Potholes and sinkholes are sprouting up, and in some cases commercial vehicles upset the traffic on narrow neighborhood streets.

“We have a very small budget to keep up on the streets and maintain them,” Edwards said.

This week, Craft and Edwards unloaded a pile of signs from a Rathdrum sign maker that will be secured to posts and set along the streets, such as 15th and Fourth streets and Wilbur Avenue, to let commercial traffic know it must take another route to get where it’s going.

“If they aren’t doing business here, then they shouldn’t be here,” said Craft, a former logging truck driver who will use his background to reach out to dispatchers at trucking companies.

“I know most of them,” he said.

The latest ordinance, No. 265, should minimize truck traffic in Dalton Gardens, a city of 3,000 sandwiched between Coeur d’Alene and Hayden.

According to the ordinance, commercial traffic is allowed in the city’s commercial zone along Government Way, and commercial traffic that is doing business anywhere in residential Dalton. Commercial vehicles heading to parcels of property along Canfield Mountain and a couple of other slivers of land that are not in Dalton City limits, but must be accessed via Wilbur or Hanley avenues, or Totten Lane, are also exempt.

Craft and Edwards — who ran unopposed — as well as the rest of the council, were elected last year to replace former council members after a recall election ousted half the council and the former mayor.

One of the issues spurring the recall was the acceptance, without citizens’ approval, of millions of dollars in federal funding by the council and mayor to improve Fourth Street — widening the main street, and adding sidewalks, a bike path, curbs and gutters.

City voters disapproved of the measure, fearing it would make their town a throughway for U.S. 95 traffic. In the meantime, Fourth Street continues to crumble, which isn’t lost on the new council members.

Craft said voters didn’t want the federal money because of additional improvements that were required as part of the grant.

“They didn’t want the sidewalks,” Craft said. “They wanted to keep the town rural.”

Having an ordinance with a number on the signs will allow county deputies to enforce it, Craft said.