Street projects to begin soon

Paving of the 2010 street sales tax projects is expected to start on Monday and that makes it time for anyone wanting a street to be considered for next year's street projects to let a member of the street and infrastructure board know about it.

Joe Charles, public works director, told the infrastructure board Thursday evening that the weather has delayed other construction projects that Blevins Asphalt was working on and they should be here next week to start on our streets.

He told the board that they are running very close to the $500,000 in construction work for 2010 and because of some construction problems they ran into on Pine Street may actually exceed $500,000 by a little.

Since voters overwhelming passed the renewal of the city's 1/2-cent transportation sales tax, the street committee is able to start looking toward what projects they will tackle during the next five years.

"I'm glad the people voted for it because we still have things to do," Ben Mendenhall, said.

"We'll do our best to spend the money appropriately," he said.

Mendenhall has been a member of the street and infrastructure since it was first formed to oversee how the transportation sales tax is spent.

"We will do a lot of repaving in the next five years," he said.

Charles told the board that the primary purpose of Thursday's meeting was to get everyone thinking about next year's list of street construction projects.

One of the projects on the list for consideration is the 1300 block of West Arch Street where Jim Adams is planning to build up to 10 apartments.

Adams told the board that in addition to the traffic from the 10 proposed apartments, the Kelso's driveway also opens onto the half block, dead end street.

He said that he will have to build off-street parking for the apartments and that he has talked to the Missouri Department of Transportation about building a drive to connect with Austin Boulevard.

Mendenhall said that the pavement at the intersection of Arch and Tower streets has been pushed up by trucks turning onto Arch and something needs to be done about that.

Other streets currently under consideration include: About $100,000 of construction on Cedar Street, from Hickory north to Atlantic, with additional construction in future years; Webster St., from Walnut to Allison; Jefferson, from Walnut to Wooter; the 900 and 1000 block of North Olive St.; Maple St. from College west to Tower and Wight St., from Washington west to Cedar.