Busy road work season ahead

PALMER — This will be a busy road construction season for the Mat-Su Borough with projects planned from Caswell all the way down to Butte this year.

Alphabetically, the list of roads set for construction is:

• Big Lake Road — realigning a curvy, dangerous stretch of the road

• Bogard Road — extending the road east into Palmer

• Caswell Lakes Road — upgrading the road

• Clapp/Mack — connecting those two roads, actually a Wasilla city project

• Hawk Lane — continuing work started last year on this Houston thoroughfare

• Knik River Road — paving the last stretch and fixing a few problem spots

• Machen Road — extending this road just north of Parks Highway

• Old Glenn Pathway — extending the path all the way to the Knik River

• Port MacKenzie Road —paving the last piece of the port access road

• Seldon/Lucille — improving the intersection, adding a roundabout

• Sullivan-Caudill Road — widening and improving parts of those Butte roads

• Sutton Pathway — building a path from Glenn Highway to Sutton Elementary School

• Vine Road — upgrades, including replacing a culvert

• Willow Lake Drive — upgrades

And that’s op top of big state road projects, such as the Parks Highway expansion north of Wasilla, and repaving a chunk of the Palmer-Wasilla Highway Extension.

Mat-Su Borough Capital Projects Manager Mike Brown said that of all the projects, the two most likely to cause delays this summer are probably Vine Road and the Seldon/Lucille intersection upgrades.

“As far as impacts, Vine is probably going to top the list,” Brown said. “Once Seldon-Lucille starts, that’s also going to have a high impact.”

He said both projects will likely include either limited access or temporary closures.

But though they are more visible, other projects are bigger in terms of scope and cost. Bogard Road is probably the largest. The long-discussed project connects Bogard to Arctic Avenue, creating an east-west corridor across the entire core of the Mat-Su. Currently Bogard ends just past the Colony schools at North 49th State Street.

Phase I of the project is slated to cost $22 million. There’s $7 million in the state’s 2015 capital budget for the project.

Another long-discussed project is one in the city of Wasilla that links Mack and Clapp Roads. The city has long said it needs that thoroughfare as a second route to its sports complex — a designated emergency shelter for the area — and the city’s airport. It is also an alternative east-west route that would hopefully draw cars off the Parks Highway.

The Machen Road extension project has a similar goal, only north of the highway instead of south.

Those are big projects that will keep the borough busy. But, on the bright side, Brown said, they don’t involve much in the way of closures.

“It’s new road construction, so it’s not going to be an inconvenience to the public,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.