'It's fun'

EPHRATA — Grant County Engineer David Bren said he has some vivid memories of watching roadwork when he was a child.

“When I was growing up, even though I wasn't a good student, I loved watching heavy civil construction,” Bren said of growing up in Medical Lake. “There was a lot of development going on in the 70s. So you would see subdivisions coming in, and they would be out there with all the heavy equipment and I was just fascinated by it.”

The graders, the earth movers, the diggers - Bren said all of it fascinated him. Even work crews would come out and plow snow were interesting, something he said he could sit and watch.

“It’s … it's just for me, it's fun,” he said.

So, even as he struggled in high school, Bren said it made sense he would grow up to become a civil engineer responsible for designing, building and fixing roads, though it took a stint in the U.S. Army Reserves to square him away enough to become serious enough about studying so that he would eventually earn a master’s of science in civil engineering.

“The people that I grew up with can't believe what I turned into. I was the guy in the auto shop all the time. I wasn't the guy that was going to be an engineer, right?” Bren said. “So what's neat about that story is I really believe if you have the will and the passion, you can do anything. As long as you set your mind to it, and you don't give up.”

Bren has held the job of Grant County Engineer for roughly a month, coming to the county after only a few months as municipal services director for the city of Moses Lake. Prior to that, he was an engineer and even ran his own college from 2009 to 2021, Washington Polytechnic Institute, which offered evening classes toward degrees in civil and mechanical engineering taught by professors like Bren who were working engineers during the day.

His Grant Cunty role gets him back to working on what he loves most — roads. The walls of his office in the County Public Works building out by the Ephrata Municipal Airport are covered with maps of Grant County. The display includes main county roads, primitive county roads, the chip seal schedule, and a giant whiteboard marked up with a lengthy to-do list in neat, precise engineer’s printing

“I still have a lot to learn,” Bren said. “It takes about two years for an engineer to get settled in.”

As county engineer, Bren said he’s in charge of overseeing the policies that govern the maintenance and repair of the 2,518 miles of roads and 195 bridges the county is responsible for.

“I have a lot of policies that I need to write up. Formal policy, how we do something, what are the rules so that we're fair and equal to everybody,” Bren said, adding it’s important to be able to explain to county residents why the county does things the way it does.

For example, Bren said some fairly primitive roads — unimproved gravel roads — may be important feeder roads for farmers taking their harvested crop to grain elevators or other buyers. Those roads might need more attention from county officials, especially during harvest season, and it’s important to be able to explain that to people who wonder why that road is getting worked on while theirs is not.

“We need to have an answer for that, we need to be able to say it's on the list, that it’s a farm-to-market road,” he said.

For regular maintenance purposes, Bren said Grant County is divided up into segments so that road crews will go through and chip seal every county road once every nine years or so.

“If you don't chip seal like that, what happens is the road starts to degrade to the point where chip sealing is going to not get you what you want, you almost have to do two layers again, to start building it up at the surface because it's so damaged,” he said. “So you have to stay on top of that maintenance. And you have to do it at regular intervals.”

While he’s not from Grant County, Bren said he likes it so much here he and his wife bought 25 acres in the far north of Grant County, not far from Grand Coulee, after nearly three decades of living and working on the West Side.

“I love the geology,” he said of the county. “I grew up in eastern Washington and got married over here, you know, and I'm so happy to be back.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com