Aldermen will approve changes to Starkville’s bond-funded Street Improvement Program at Tuesday’s meeting after City Engineer Edward Kemp presented them to the board at Friday’s work session.
The $7.5 million capital improvement project is in its third of four years, with almost $1 million set aside for the next year. The Engineering and Streets department plans to patch and overlay just more than five miles of roads citywide.
The city will advertise for construction bids after Tuesday’s vote on the year’s worth of projects, and Kemp said some roads had been added or removed from the year’s list due to other projects being planned in the same neighborhoods or some roads needing more repairs than others.
The plan was initially approved by the board in 2017, and the first year included repairs to Santa Anita Drive, Lynn Lane, Louisville Street, Montgomery Street and Long Street.
“With any plan that you build several years out, there are a lot of things that come up,” Kemp said. “It’s very hard to predict how a road will perform, and for the most part we got very close to right, but some streets deteriorate more quickly than others, and there are things that occur such as the utility improvement (project) at Green Oaks, something that was not even considered three or four years ago.”
The board voted to advertise for bids for the first phase of the Green Oaks $2.4 million water/sewer infrastructure replacement project at the May 19 meeting. Kemp said the Green Oaks portion of the road plan will hopefully not overlap with the utility work, so the road work on Mangrove Palm and Spruce Lane will not start until the utility work is completed. He also took Ward Drive off the original list for the year, since a development at the nearby intersection of Scales and Louisville streets was recently approved.
The plan lists 25 stretches of road in all areas of the city, with the most expensive ones on Edgewood Drive, Lindbergh Boulevard, Long Street and North Montgomery Street. The four total about $268,000, more than one-fourth of the cost for the year.
Colonial Circle and Grand Ridge Road have “performed better than anticipated,” Kemp said, so he removed them from this year’s project list and replaced them with two nearby streets that are “deteriorating very quickly and need some immediate attention,” Dunlap Street and Kirkside Drive. He also added the short Tanglewood Street to this year’s list because it is adjacent to Edgewood Drive.
Country Club Road is the last new addition to this year’s project list.
“It looks a little bit like a patchwork quilt because we’ve done so many repairs and pothole replacements and things like that,” Kemp said.
The project list includes a $25,000 allowance to restripe some heavily traveled roads that do not need new overlays but have lost their striping over time, including Spring Street, the Avenue of Patriots and the southern end of Industrial Park Road. Restriping will make the roads safer and put off the eventual need for new overlays, Kemp said.
Mayor Lynn Spruill and the aldermen present at the work session agreed to put the plan on Tuesday’s consent agenda, meaning it will be approved with no debate.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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