Road construction continues on schedule

The road construction project from Heritage Parkway west on 271st Street, now known as Gateway Boulevard, continues on schedule.

Despite a wetter than normal summer, Ben Scholtz, transportation project manager and design engineer for the project with HDR, the city’s engineer, considers themselves lucky with this project since so many other construction projects in the Sioux Falls area are way behind schedule.

“Things are doing pretty well. From my understanding, we’re doing much better with the weather this year than some of the other projects in Sioux Falls. There’s a lot of projects in the Sioux Falls are that are quite a bit behind schedule. So us being on schedule is a good thing,” he said.

He noted that road surfacing has been completed from the Heritage Parkway intersection west to Main Avenue on Gateway Boulevard. Work continues on the sidewalks on the north side of the road. Scholtz expected the sidewalk to get finished yet this week if the weather cooperated.

The drainage ditch along the north side of the road from Carla Avenue toward Heritage Parkway looks like a mess, Scholtz said, with a bunch of weeds growing there.

“We’ll grade that out yet and reseed that as well. That’s one of the last things we’ll do,” he said.

All of the pipes for the driveways and approaches are in and functioning how they need to be. The pavement has been striped. They are waiting to put the arrows in the central lane until closer to project completion since they continue to move cones around for traffic movement.

The footings are in on the south side of the road for street lights. The street lights and traffic signal need to be installed yet and Scholtz expected them to be delivered sometime in September with hopes of taking 2-3 weeks to get them installed.

On the west end of the project, the road remains closed from Main Avenue west because the pavement has been removed while they installed the water main, sanitary sewer and storm sewer. Scholtz said they have a little work left to finish the storm sewer inlets.

Then they are bringing in gravel and fabric for the road base from Main Avenue to Devon Avenue. Once grading work is completed, they will work on curb and gutter. He is hoping that is happening in the next two weeks.

In addition to this road project, the City and Delapre Township are continuing to pave the road over to 468th Avenue. They will remove the rest of the pavement west of Cole Avenue to 468th Avenue.

“That’s a two-lane section just like it is now. It’ll just be an improved pavement. Once that is done, it’ll look like one whole brand new road,” he said.

Scholtz is confident that the whole road will be open to traffic by the project completion date of Oct. 26.

“I’m still quite confident that we’ll hit that unless it rains every single day from here until then,” he said.