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Two Canfield City road projects delayed a year due to funding cuts to ODOT
By ROBERT CONNELLY
CANFIELD
The final phase of improvements to North Broad Street in Canfield has been pushed back to next year because more funds are needed.
Joe Warino, city manager, first discussed the matter at the June 3 Canfield City Council meeting and said the city would need to come up with an additional $100,000 to fund it this year. He had a meeting with officials from the Ohio Department of Transportation and the Eastgate Regional Council of Governments, where it was said no additional funding would be available for the city.
The third phase of upgrades to North Broad Street includes repaving 0.66 miles on South Broad Street from Court Street to the fairgrounds; 1.42 miles on U.S. Route 224 from the Village Green to Palmyra Road; and 0.66 miles on South Lisbon Street from the Village Green to state Route 446. ODOT has funded 80 percent of that project through an urban paving grant.
“Now is probably not the best time to bid this project. ODOT has been experiencing very high and over the engineer estimates on bids this time of year,” Warino said.
It will go to bid in January 2016 “when there is more competitive bidding. [ODOT] doesn’t foresee the funding situation being any different at that particular time, but we may absorb some of the overage in a better bid at that particular time.”
Warino explained that Eastgate, in the past, had picked up 80 percent of the city’s 20 percent of the overall project cost. ODOT is paying 80 percent of the North Broad Street upgrades. Eastgate is not picking up the 80 percent for the city on this project.
“As far as Eastgate is concerned, we never had any funding for that job. That was strictly between ODOT and the city,” said Ken Simpson, transportation manager with Eastgate.
That project now will be done in the same year as upgrades to state Route 46 north of the city. The second project is to widen Route 46 from Dartmouth Avenue to the city limits, the bridge for the Ohio Turnpike. That project likely will trail the North Broad Street improvement project by six months as the city determines whether utilities in the right of way will need to be relocated.
The city will pay the full cost of widening the road from Sleepy Hollow to Dartmouth because there wasn’t enough traffic data to meet ODOT’s funding threshold. Curbs and sidewalks will be added. For motorists, this will widen Route 46 about 800 feet further from where it now condenses driving north from the city.
The city will pay a combined $600,000 for the combined $2.6 million projects.
These last two projects will mean that the city has resurfaced every state route in the city since Warino took office in 2009.
“One of the priorities when I came into office was obviously 46, and that’s been a priority for the city for some time to continue the widening and the lighting [of the road] to the Ohio Turnpike,” Warino said.