State widening Seward Meridian

WASILLA — You can’t exactly get far starting a road construction project around here after summer is over, but the state says it’s going to get as far as it can on Seward Meridian before winter weather halts construction.

Crews will be back at it again in the spring.

“The contract completion date is end of October 2012,” said Todd Smith, project engineer with the state Department of Transportation and Public Facility. “I suspect by this time next year, Labor Day, it’ll be finished.”

The plan is to expand the road to four lanes from the Parks Highway up past the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

“You’ll have two northbound lanes, two southbound lanes on Seward Meridian and then you’ll have the two-way left-turn-only lane,” he said.

Smith also said there will also be a divided pathway for pedestrians that will tie in with pathways the department has put in around Seward Meridian’s intersection with Parks Highway and connect them to the path along the Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

It also means pedestrians will finally have a north-south route on that end of town.

“Now at least you can see a little better because we have cleared it, but there is absolutely no shoulder to walk on. I think it’s pretty treacherous,” Smith said.

The five-lane stretch will end just north of Cottonwood Creek Elementary. There is a planned Phase II of the project to bring it all the way up to the road’s terminus at Bogard Road, but that won’t go out to bid for some time.

Turn lanes are also going in at the Palmer-Wasilla Highway intersection, which will necessitate some work on the highway, but the department will be doing more than just working on the intersection, extending its work out to the east and the west.

“That’s roughly just under a half a mile on both sides of Seward Meridian,” Smith said.

Anyone hoping for four lanes from downtown to Shoreline Drive is going to be disappointed.

“Those improvements include basically adding in left turn pockets” and resurfacing the road, Smith said.

It’s kind of a challenging project. Anyone who’s seen the boarded up houses along the west side of Seward Meridian knows there was a lot of right-of-way to purchase. Smith said those houses didn’t end up selling before the project went out to bid. So the winning contractor, Quality Asphalt and Paving, now owns them as part of the contract it signed.

“QAP has hired a contractor to move the ones that are worth moving,” Smith said. “The ones that are damaged beyond any value, beyond repair will be demolished and hauled off.”

The terrain is also challenging. On the west side there is a steep hill and then kind of a void next to the road on the southwest quadrant of the Palmer-Wasilla intersection.

Smith said the gravel pulled out of the hill when the department goes to level it off will be used to fill in the low-lying area.

When it’s all done, Smith said, Seward Meridian will look a lot like Crusey Street.

“Our pathway is going to be more separated instead of doing an actual curb and gutter section. We went with kind of more of a greenbelt,” he said.

But in terms of the size of the road, “if you kind of look at Crusey, it’s going to give you a real good vibe of what Seward Meridian is going to look like,” he said.

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