City could bump up street resurfacing plans

BY CHUCK VANDENBERG
PCC EDITOR

FORT MADISON - Getting Fort Madison's streets up to speed may take a dozen years, but city officials say the process is coming quicker than they expected.

At Tuesday's regular meeting of the Fort Madison City Council Public Works Director Mark Bousselot said the city is putting close to $300,000 per year toward asphalt and seal coating projects with the exception of the 2022-23 fiscal year.

Bousselot said the city is looking at about 88 blocks of resurfacing and 12 years to get the work done.

Bousselot said he separated the streets with asphalt and seal coating into four categories, with the Category 1 being the worst.

"The first four years will be focusing on category one streets, and then a category two would start in year 5," Bousselot said.

"I didn't plug in any streets in year two to allocate that money to sewer separation, but at year three we'll get back at it."

He's allocated about $1.2 million over the first five years. Bousselot estimated the 12 years of work will cost about $3.36 million to complete.

City Manager David Varley said the Road Use Funds are performing better than expected and that timeline could shrink to under 10 years with possibly being able to bump up annual spends to $400,000.

Varley said the city's Road Use fund is doing better than expected during hte pandemic, and the city could see an extra $150,000 from the next stimulus package for fund earmarked to states for road projects.

In a related issue, the city approved entering into a contract with Jones Contracting for the reconstruction of Highway 61 from 6th to 10th streets for just over $3.3 million dollars.

The project will be the same scope of work as the 2nd to 6th Street projects and carried an engineers bid of $3.9 million.

The Iowa Department of Transportation opened bids on the project Feb. 16 and city officials can't speak with Jones about the work until the contracts are signed. Mark Bousselot said he's expecting a fall 2021 completion date.

In other action, the council:
• approved, 6-0, a resolution to allow the city to find light duty work in handling on the job injuries.
• approved, 6-0, a three-year contract settlement with teamsters Local 238 workers at the city water department, 2.5% increase for each of the next two years.
• approved agreement with Klingner & Associates for jetty wall improvement at the Marina to raise it up over the 500-year level.
• approved, 6-0, a supplemental agreement (third) with Klingner & Associates for redesign of storm/sewer separation in the new Amtrak Depot area.