White Oak council gets update on road project

By JEFF STITT

jstitt@yourmvi.com

Engineer Ken Hillman gave White Oak council a brief update Monday on a road stabilization project that’s been mulled over for several years, but wasn’t approved until last month.

In June, council awarded a $314,546 contract to Clearwater Construction for the Center Street Extension roadway project.

After listening to the engineer’s report Monday, council learned construction for the project to secure an unstable hillside below the road might not start until late summer.

“It came in higher than we anticipated,” Hillman said at a recent meeting. 

He attributed a higher bid price to the cost of construction materials, such as pre-cast concrete, having “gone up significantly” amid the pandemic. There have been reports of other construction and building materials, such as PVC piping and lumber, increasing in cost as well as shortages of materials.

There have been issues with an unstable hillside on Center Street Extension since at least 2013, and various councils over the years have discussed what it would take to fix it. Some have even applied for and secured some grant funding and had sampling and studies done.

The road was previously completely closed and motorists were forced to take a detour through the White Oak Farms and White Oak Apartments complexes. It opened with some motorist restrictions within the last year or so.

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