The Summit Board of County Commissioners told county staff Tuesday, Feb. 18, that it wants to see better communication with the public about traffic conditions during snow events moving forward.

Over the Presidents Day weekend, holiday travel combined with heavy snow led to traffic backups throughout Summit County, especially when Interstate 70 was closed. Similar traffic jams occurred during the Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend last year.

Commissioner Tamara Pogue said at a work session Tuesday that she was “frustrated at how bad it was at the north end of the county,” over the Presidents Day weekend. Pogue said at one point she couldn’t get to Silverthorne to pick up her children and had to get someone else to pick them up. She said that drivers at times could not get in or out of the Dillon Valley neighborhood.

“I understand traffic is not itself an emergency,” Pogue said. “But I also watched a fire truck with its sirens on, not able to move, not able to respond to whoever called it because the traffic was so bad.”

Pogue said that the only notifications that she received from the Summit County Alert system were related to the Dillon Dam Road closures, but there were no alerts about Swan Mountain or the heavy traffic creating major backups elsewhere in the county. She said she got “legitimate complaints” from residents who didn’t know about the traffic until they encountered it on the roads.

“I have heard from so many residents that if they knew what was happening, they would have made different decisions,” Pogue said. “The different decisions may have been the difference between that firetruck being able to respond and not being able to respond.”

Commissioner Eric Mamula agreed that the public didn’t receive enough information about the traffic jams.

“We’re in the customer service business as a county and we’re doing an (expletive) job in that respect,” Mamula said.

Assistant County Manager Andy Atencio said that the direction from the county’s 911 policy board has been for dispatchers to not communicate road closures unless they get approval from an officer on scene.

Atencio said that an officer on scene is typically the person making the decision whether a closure will last five minutes or for hours, while 911 dispatchers don’t know how long the road will be closed for.

“When it’s not an accident or something like that but it’s this type of (traffic jam) situation, 911 has to have a little bit more leeway and a little more authority to make a determination on whether or not to send out an alert that ‘traffic is dead in Silverthorne, please avoid the area,’ or something like that,” Atencio said. “They don’t really have that leeway as directed by the 911 policy board.”

Pogue noted that there are complexities with communicating information about roadways managed by multiple agencies including the Colorado State Patrol, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the towns of Dillon, Keystone and Silverthorne, and the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. But she added, “One of the most important things you can do in a traffic situation is communicate with the public.”

Atencio said that he sees better communication from the Colorado Department of Transportation in the region west of Summit County than he does from the region that covers Summit County. He said while he gets texts from that region, he gets very few texts about what is happening at the Eisenhower-Johnson Memorial Tunnel, where traffic often builds up due to closures or holds.

A Colorado Department of Transportation spokesperson said she could not provide a comment by Summit Daily News’ deadline due to the snowstorm Thursday evening.

Summit County Sheriff Jaime FitzSimons said in a statement that the Sheriff’s Office regularly amplifies the state transportation department’s messaging on its social media platforms, including the status of I-70, Colorado Highway 9 and U.S. Highway 6.

FitzSimons said that the Summit County Alert system informs subscribers of extended county road closures and emergencies. He encouraged residents and visitors to sign up for the alerts at TinyUrl.com/SummitCountyAlerts.

“I always advocate for clear and direct communication with the Summit County community and share the frustration of an overloaded road system,” FitzSimons said. “During events like last weekend, our deputies focus on real-time emergency responses, where lives are often at stake. Providing timely and accurate updates on road conditions and heavy traffic is outside the Sheriff’s Office’s current mission, capacity, and budget.”