Bye-bye highway: As of Monday, one Minnesota state highway will cease to exist

As of Monday, a state highway in western Minnesota will cease to exist.

The road will still be there, carrying traffic past fields, farmsteads and the small community of Gluek.

But the Minnesota Department of Transportation is transferring ownership of State Highway 277 to Chippewa County. It's known as a "turnback" — turning back control of that 11-mile stretch of highway east of Montevideo to the county.

It's part of an ongoing process in which MnDOT meets with local and county officials and assesses how highways are used, and whether a turnback is warranted. Several other state highways have been turned back to counties in recent years.

MnDOT project manager Lowell Flaten said Minnesota's roads and highways fall into three tiers. At the top is the state highway system, which generally sees higher traffic volumes and traffic that is traveling longer distances.

Then there are county roads and highways, which carry traffic to points within a county and serve as feeders to state highways.

And the third tier is town and city roads, which generally see lower traffic volumes, or vehicles traveling short distances.

"The state highway system is typically the long-haul (traffic), higher traffic volumes. ... Highway 277 is a road that is typically not used for those longer trips," Flaten said. "It's used more as a collector for the (state) trunk highway system and for local trips."

Highway 277's traffic volume of about 600 vehicles a day is more typical for county roads, he said.

Flaten said the transfer isn't as simple as just removing the old signs and putting up new ones for Chippewa County Road 4 — though that's part of it. The land the road is on has been owned by the state, and that property ownership transfers to the county.

As part of the turnback, MnDOT will be giving Chippewa County $9.7 million for reconstruction of the highway. And it'll be a county state aid highway, so it'll receive some state money each year for maintenance.

But the responsibility for maintaining and plowing the road will be the county's from now on. Flaten said that's where people who drive Highway 277 may see some benefit from the turnback.

"By putting the highway into the hands of the county road system, it becomes a higher priority for snow plowing and for pavement maintenance," he said.

As a state highway, "it doesn't compete well with our other trunk highways that have higher volumes." But for the county, "it will be a higher priority because in comparison to the rest of their system this will be a higher-volume route."

Highway 277 was designated by the Legislature in 1949. It follows a north-south route between state highways 7 and 40.

Flaten said it's less common, but not unheard-of, for highways to be transferred “up” from county to state control. One recent example was in Lac qui Parle County, when the state took over a county highway north of Dawson and designated it as part of State Highway 119. At the same time, a nearby state highway — Highway 275 to Boyd — was turned back to county control.

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