Tombstone's famed Allen Street still has that dusty, Old West feel to it. A dirt road will do that for you.
But concerns over air quality, both for town residents and for the community's countless annual visitors — not to mention a failed lawsuit — have prompted Tombstone's mayor to do away with the dirt.
Or, at least, most of it.
Mayor Dustin Escapule says all but "maybe a half-inch" of dirt was scraped off a three-block stretch of Allen, Tombstone's main tourist drag, earlier this month.
That compares with the between 3 and 10 inches of dirt put down three years ago by then-Mayor Andree DeJournett to make the town look more like it did in the 1880s, he said at the time.
Shop owners along Allen Street said the road looked just fine before the dirt was put down, and that its presence did more harm than good.
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"The whole idea of putting dirt onto the most densely populated three blocks in the county was ludicrous," Allen Street business owner Frank Groppo said. "It was made worse by the stagecoaches."
Groppo filed a lawsuit in 2006 against the town over the dirt deposits, only to see a Cochise County Superior Court judge squash his attempt to prevent the town from putting down any more soil. He said the stagecoaches caused the dirt to be ground down into finer and finer particles, which then got into the stores along Allen Street and clouded up the air.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality received 14 complaints during a one-week span in April 2006, prompting the state agency to conduct an inspection.
No mandate was given by ADEQ to remove the dirt, said Escapule, who had been mayor from 2000 to 2004 and was re-elected to the post in November.
His concern over people's health — more than complaints about damage to store merchandise — drove him to get rid of most of the dirt.
"The merchandise you can replace," he said. "But how do you fix someone's lungs?"
No decision has been made on when — or if — to remove the remainder of the dirt, Escapule said.
The mayor said he's looking into a variety of options for Allen Street, including the use of a polymer soil stabilizer known as Envirotac, which is meant to cut down on dust.
Another possibility: taking all the dirt off and painting the blacktop brown, to look like dirt.
"We have done some tests with striping paint, and it appears that might work," Escapule said. "But we're still trying to see if we can't make the Envirotac work. We darn sure need to make sure our town looks presentable for our tourists."
DID YOU KNOW
The decision to put dirt down on Allen Street in 2006 — as well as the call to take it off earlier this month — resulted from Tombstone's mayor taking advantage of his ability to make executive decisions independent of the City Council, current Mayor Dustin Escapule said.
Tombstone operates under what is known as a city clerk form of government, where the mayor serves as the town's de facto CEO and can make some decisions without council approval.
That compares with cities such as Tucson and Sierra Vista, which have a city manager in place to make such decisions. Most of those decisions, however, require council approval.
