[The NewCanaanite.com Summer Internship Program is sponsored by Karp Associates.]
Town officials last month voted to approve a request from the Department of Public Works to repave the one-way stretch of Elm Street downtown.
“We went out to bid, we publicly advertised, and directly solicited from six different contractors,” according to Public Works Director Tiger Mann.
The town received two bids back – Burns Construction and FGB Construction and Burns was the low bidder with a total of $186,879.75.
“The funds are available on our payment management program and one of the reasons Burns was low here was because they’re already slated to be night-paving the week of August 6 – August 6 and 7 – so they’ve already given us a timeframe to go and do it,” Mann told the selectmen at their July 22 meeting, held at Town Hall and via videoconference. “They’ve done nice work for us in the past.”
The construction will be performed overnight, according to Mann, from about 9 or 10 p.m. to 5 or 6 a.m.
He noted that in the last two times this repair has been done, there has been no conflict with “any of the operations in the downtown business area.”
He continued: “We’d like to get this paved and put this area to bed.”
First Selectman Dionna Carlson and Selectmen Steve Karl and Amy Murphy Carroll voted 3-0 in favor of the contract.
It’s been years coming.
Murphy Carroll asked Karl, “How excited are you for this?”
Karl replied: “I can’t tell you how excited I am about this. It has been a couple years in the making. I’ve asked you, I don’t know, a hundred times, Tiger, so I am very, very excited about this. My only question is, how long after we pave it on the sixth and seventh are we going to be able to stripe it?”
Mann responded, “We are going to have to wait a week at least, because if not the oils will track all over the top of the fresh striping and it will basically lose half its life so we have to wait about a week. Safety Markings has already been contacted – they’re inside this contract so they are the subcontractor of Burns for the work and they know the importance of the area.”
He added: “We are speaking separately to the contractor who did the decorative crosswalk installation at the library to come and do the six crosswalks here. We’ve already reached out to him – he’s going to come and do a site visit and then we’ll get a pricing from him and a contract to you. It’s almost a sole source provider for this type of work that he doe. We have up to six months to get that work and they like to let the pavement sit a little bit before they come in and do their work. We’re hoping to have that done by the close of this construction season.”
Murphy Carroll asked, “So then you pave where the crosswalks are not [marked] and then you go back?”
Mann replied: “That’s correct, we pave the entire road and then come back and address the crosswalk separately. It would not be beneficial to stop for that eight feet and stop. It’s better to just put the pavement down and then work on it after.”
Karl added, “So you’ll pave and then stripe crosswalks for the four or five months and then eventually we’ll get the decorative crosswalks – you’re saying before the winter is the idea, right?
Mann said yes, adding: “We just have to fit into his timeframe right now. We have a site visit planned for him shortly and are working with his availability.”
The selectmen asked about manhole covers in the street (their heights will be adjusted so that they’re at grade), whether Elm Street will be left alone for a period of years (can’t tell) and whether the crosswalks will be laid out in brick (no) or stamped concrete (similar).
Karl added, “When that was done properly, and the way that looked – you can remember what it looked like – it was beautiful.”
The first time the road was decorated in such a fashion it was 2006 or 2007, said Mann.
“We were so happy and so proud,” Karl said.
When asked whether cutting the asphalt post construction to input the sidewalks would impact the durability, Mann said it would not.
“When we did it the first time, we had no spalling, we had no concerns with the joints between the two because it was asphalt material and asphalt material – we didn’t have a problem at all,” he said.
The estimate mentioned above, however, only includes the initial repaving and striping – not the new crosswalks.
Is the plan to reinstall the faux brick crosswalks? If so, we should reconsider, has anyone been to Westport recently? Those are done right.