Highway committee to address concerns about Three Lakes area roadway

A petition with 161 names was submitted to Oneida County highway commissioner Alex Hegeman and other county officials in mid-November.

The petition, sent by Three Lakes residents Kelly Keating and Janet McCabe, in in regard to the county highway department’s maintenance of County Highway A in the Three Lakes area. 

“Several members in the Three Lakes community and around our area have come together to support one another with the conditions of Highway A in Oneida County,” Keating said in a letter accompanying the petition. “The highway is not maintained properly by the county and there are several deaths and accidents yearly. It is also the last highway to get plowed and we might be lucky if it is sanded properly.”

The maintenance issues carry into the summer months as well, she added. 

“The shoulders, gravel, have not been turned over in several years,” she wrote. “Grass has been growing through the gravel itself and has not been mowed. This is a highly traveled highway with high school students, buses, and is one of the main highways to get into Three Lakes.”

Keating also mentioned Oneida County’s Med 8 ambulance uses Hwy. A “to travel on to Sugar Camp and Three Lakes.”

Though she doesn’t have the documentation for the claims of “several deaths and accidents yearly” — she told The Lakeland Times she’s unsure as to how to go about gathering the information — on Hwy. A, she knows something of the crashes that have taken place; one of them was in February of this year and her parents were involved in it. 

Her parents survived  but the occupants of the other vehicle, Donna Ferguson, 69, and Wilson Ferguson, 63, of Three Lakes, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash on Hwy. A near the intersection with Sampson Road in Three Lakes. 

“My friend’s daughter was in an accident,” Keating said. “There are accidents on Hwy. A all the time in the winter. All the time. A lot of them aren’t reported.”

She told the Times the 161 people who signed are Oneida County taxpayers, most of them year-round residents of Three Lakes and Sugar Camp. 

“We barely promoted the petition,” Keating said. “Once the word got out that they (the petitions) were out, people were contacting everyone asking ‘Where can we sign it?’ We would have had way more signatures but it came to the point where we had to pull them to start doing something about it.”

She said there are people who have quit their jobs in Rhinelander because “they refuse to take that highway.”

“There will be people coming (to the Dec. 28 committee meeting) in support of that petition,” Keating said. “That’s one of the main highways ... we have our Three Lakes school district and we have the Sugar Camp school district. Well, Sugar Camp, those students all go to Three Lakes. That’s another thing. All these high school students, their transportation is on Hwy. A.”

Regarding fire department operations, she said if Three Lakes firefighters and equipment had to go to Sugar Camp or vice versa for the call of a fire or serious vehicle accident or crash, “well, the main highway is Hwy. A.”

“That also reduces the time of an emergency response,” Keating said. 

Getting prepared

At the Dec. 7 meeting of the Oneida County board’s public works committee, which oversees the county highway department, the committee discussed the Dec. 28 meeting the panel will have with Keating and other Three Lakes area residents regarding their concerns about Hwy. A. 

Hegeman said the petition was received by the highway department on Nov. 21 and he told the committee Keating and others couldn’t attend the Dec. 7 meeting but he checked with her to see if the committee’s next meeting on Dec. 28 would work for them “so they could discuss with the committee their concerns.”

“I wanted to give you guys a copy of the petition, if you haven’t seen it already, and had time to digest it and, I guess, if you have any questions for me how we do things or what our process is,” he said.

“Do you do anything different than anybody else?” committee member Bob Almekinder asked. “Any other roads?”

“I would say this road (Hwy. A) gets the most attention of all our sand (treated) county roads,” Hegeman said, clarifying later in the discussion that treatment is a sand/salt mixture. 

“It’s a solid three-and-a-half to four hours to do one round,” he said. “That’s not unlike our other county routes. It’s our third longest route ... there are two routes longer than that.”

“So, in other words, you don’t get it down clean enough so they can keep doing 75 miles per hour,” Almekinder said. “Is that it?”

Committee member Billy Fried asked Hegeman if he has any statistics from “over the years” regarding accidents and deaths on Hwy. A that Keating mentioned in her letter. Hegeman said he can collect the information and bring it for committee members. 

Hegeman mentioned the February 2023, fatal accident Keating referred to and another crash he said he wasn’t “sure of when it was” at the intersection with State Highway 17 in which a vehicle ran a stop sign and there were fatalities. 

“That’s because you didn’t salt it enough?” Almekinder said. “Somebody ran a stop sign?”

“I was pretty young when that happened but I will be collecting accident reports,” Hegeman said. “I’ll probably go back 10 years through the Community Maps website and collect accident reports.”

Community Maps is a website run by the University of Wisconsin/Madison that includes state accident reports going back several years.

Committee member Mike Timmons said Oneida County Sheriff Grady Hartman and his staff should be able to help Hegeman gather the information he needs. 

Fried asked another question based on what Keating stated in her letter regarding county highway plowing operations.

“Is it true this is the last stretch that gets plowed?” he asked. 

“No,” Timmons said before Hegeman could answer. 

Hegeman explained the Oneida County patrol truck, or plow truck, operates out of the highway department’s garage in Three Lakes. 

“It starts on Hwy. A and does (Hwy.) A to (Hwy.) 17 going out,” he said. “Comes back east on A, loads up with sand, does A again and then goes on D, H and O.”

“OK, so there’s some misperceptions in this,” Fried said.

“It may seem like it is (the last stretch),” Hegeman, who told the committee later in the discussion he drives Hwy. A “every day,” said. “I get stuck behind him (patrol truck) at 4:15, 4:30 on the way to work and he goes back on D. By the time he’s back on A, two-and-a-half to three hours have passed. So, it may seem like it but I don’t know how to get around that.”

“Well, it all boils down to people don’t want to slow down for driving in the winter time,” Almekinder said.  “You see that everywhere nowadays.”

Timmons, also Woodruff’s town chairman, said his town’s road crew was called out the day before when barely an inch of snow fell. 

“When the sun came out on the little bit that was there, there were ... tragedies all over,” he said, somewhat sarcastically. “It was the FedEx drivers that were complaining the loudest.”

“Well, FedEx and UPS drivers, they don’t know what the speed limit is,” Almekinder said. 

As for the 161 signatures on the petition, Hegeman said he was “born and raised in Three Lakes.”

“Lived there basically my whole life,” he said. “I didn’t recognize a whole ton of names on there. I know we’ve had a lot of people moving up here the last several years.”

“No address either,” Fried said as he looked at the petition. 

“How many of those people actually live here?” Almekinder asked and Fried said a person signing the petition should have included their address on it as well. 

“I just want to be prepared that we have some facts behind the things we’re saying, which they might refute,” Fried said. “It’s not an ‘us against them.’ It’s them understanding how you operate throughout the county and, I guess, getting their expectations.”

Brian Jopek may be reached via email at [email protected].