It’s already November and we are getting some real fall type weather, football weather, and first frost outdoor weather. It has stayed warmer than normal this fall and we are still waiting on the foliage to turn in some areas. The first frost is an important event to our asphalt road maintenance efforts as it marks the beginning of lower ground temperature. Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) has a low ambient and ground temperature limit to ensure proper set under compaction. It’s a warm weather activity.
Our repair crews will continue working on overlays and large area patch repairs on our asphalts roads until we get a hard freeze; and, will continue to crack seal and patch potholes throughout the winter. November 2016 marks the “letting” of state contract bids for two important road and bridge projects.
First, the bridge reconstruction project on the Seward Cottonwood Creek Bridge just west of Broadway is scheduled to open this month. Bridge construction should begin by early spring of 2017 and should finish not later than this coming fall. We are all looking forward to getting this bridge opened again.
Second, the Simpson Road asphalt overlay project. This is an important one and one half mile long road project. For the last two months the majority of all our efforts have been focused on cutting, clearing, shaping, grading, and compacting shoulders on the right of way area to meet the required county road standards for federal grant application. We have since been notified that all that hard work paid off and we now meet the requirement to have this contract “let” this month with re-surfacing expected to begin mid-April 2017 timeframe. This project should finish up mid-summer 2017.
Our 5 miles of projects for Coltrane road are still on track for getting 2 miles paved in 2017 along with the ACOG federal grant applications for all three phases of this project. We just finished meeting with the design engineers and we should be seeing construction begging next summer on Coltrane phase 2, which is the two mile stretch between Simpson and Simmons Roads. Federal grant applications will be turned in by December 2016. We also will have several grant applications this year for safety improvements in addition to the Coltrane requests.
We just received our annual bridge inspection report and have six bridges that require some sort of maintenance to avoid future issues which may become serious. Our road foreman and bridge crews are now assessing the level of effort and cost estimates needed to complete the repairs for these six bridges.
We also continue to rebuild our dirt/gravel roads with truckloads of new compacted shale. We have been concentrating those efforts in the county side of the Cashion school bus routes. We will also be starting our winter right of way maintenance efforts with clearing out brush and trimming trees once the leaves fall and they go dormant.
That’s all we have time for today; next month I will outline our yearly budget and operations report.
Until next time, be safe out there on our county roads and bridges.
Marven Goodman
Commissioner
Logan County, District 1
Work: 405 282-3581
commissioner@commissiondistrict1.com