The Arkansas Department of Transportation's (ARDOT) partnership program is helping cities finish projects faster, such as West Fork who wanted a new bridge to replace an aging structure that carries Main Street over the West Fork of the White River.
On February 22, West Fork passed a resolution with to partner with ARDOT who added the bridge to its list of projects according to Chad Adams, the head of Division 4 for ARDOT.
"So we are still in the very early stages," Adams said. "We are currently targeting 2026 for this work."
According to Mayor Heith Caudle, the bridge will be built and, in exchange, will take over future maintenance of it and Arkansas 170, Main Street, through the city.
"It's been something that we've been needing for a while. We'd been trying to get some traction for quite some time going through normal channels, and we weren't getting anywhere," Caudle said. "The state wasn't interested."
The existing bridge is reaching the end of its life, being built in the 1960's. Caudle expects survey work to start this summer.
"Our original bridge design was a three-lane bridge with pedestrian paths on both sides. The state said there's no way in the world they're going to build a bridge like that in West Fork," Caudle said. "So, we compromised, and we are getting a two-lane bridge with a 10-foot walkway on the north side of it."
"It's been in bad shape. That deck on it, every time it rains it opens the pot holes," Caudle said, adding that maintenance on the bridge is "almost a full-time project."
According to Caudle, the city won't spend any money on the new bridge thanks to the partnership program.
The agreement will also free the city to make some other improvements on the street, Caudle said.
"As it stands, if we want to do sidewalk improvements or anything like that, we've gotta go through the state authorities just to get permission to put a sidewalk within so many feet of it. There are some drainage issues that have been problems forever that the city can't fix," Caudle said. "It's going to give us the opportunity to do some things that really need to be done on that strip of road anyway and potentially better maintain it."
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Source: ArkansasOnline.com
