Newly paved road now a rough ride

Four-block section serving Lonoke schools crumbling, blocking traffic

Six months after an important artery serving the Lonoke County School District was repaved, a four-block section of it is falling apart to the point of blocking buses and vehicles of parents and students who were supposed to be using it.

“The traffic over here is a nightmare,” said Tiffany Schafer, who has one child in the middle school. “It’s definitely made it really hard to come and get your child.”

The traffic woes, particularly during the morning commute, also have been an unpleasant development for Lonoke city officials, who applied for and received a $250,000 grant from the State Aid Street Committee last year to repave several streets around the district’s four schools on the southwest side of the city of 4,200.

The streets included a roughly 10-block section of West Palm Street, which begins at U.S. 70 and runs in front of three of the district’s four schools.

Parents and students also used it to go to the high school, which is two blocks off the street.

“This is the biggest thing that has happened in Lonoke in a while,” said state Rep. Camille Bennett, D-Lonoke.

The repaving project cost $272,000 and was completed by the Rogers Group of Nashville, Tenn., a longtime road contractor in the region.

All the paved streets are fine except for the four-block section of West Palm. But it is a key part of the route to and from the schools. Extra police have been assigned to handle traffic at the beginning of the school day.

“It’s a hardship on the bus drivers, parents and community members that live here,” said Suzanne Bailey, the superintendent for the school district, which has an enrollment of 1,748 in kindergarten through 12th grade and runs 20 bus routes daily. “It’s a safety hazard, and the rerouting is through streets that aren’t prepared to take the traffic. We have a big mess.”

The damaged section of the street, city officials said, was the only section that has curbs and gutters and, thus, required some milling of the old pavement. The work was substantially completed almost a year ago, and a final inspection was in March, according to records.

But it wasn’t long before the new pavement began deteriorating, developing weblike imperfections initially and then potholes and undulations. A portion of the deteriorating section is in front of the gates to the school bus lot, and the buses have to use part of the four-block section to get in and out of the lot.

The city doesn’t have the money to make the repairs, which are estimated to cost about $187,000 because the section would have to be rebuilt, a more expensive proposition than simply repaving it.

School district officials said it also would cost several thousand dollars to build a new entrance to the lot.

“We spent every dime we had on paving,” said Lonoke Mayor Wayne McGee. “We’re between a rock and a hard place.”

He expects the deterioration to accelerate once rain returns.

“If it hadn’t been so dry for the past few months, it would be much worse,” McGee said.

The problem with the project appears to be an anomaly in the Arkansas State Aid City Street program, which the Arkansas Legislature enacted in 2011. Voter approval in 2012 of a half-percentage-point increase in the statewide sales tax helped finance a $1.8 billion road package called the Connecting Arkansas Program.

The vote also permanently dedicated 1 cent per gallon of the existing gasoline tax to the State Aid City Street Fund, or about $18 million annually. Most of the tax proceeds formerly went to the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department.

The department administers the program, but projects are approved by the State Aid Street Committee.

The nine-member committee, all mayors, has approved 254 requests for city street overlay repaving projects totaling $56.9 million since 2013. To date, 195 projects worth $45.9 million have been completed, according to a report available on the program’s website, citystreet.arkansas.gov.

The committee’s chairman, Paragould Mayor Mike Gaskill, praised the reach of the program.

“I would say 99 percent of the projects have been satisfactory to all the cities that have received them,” he said.

Gaskill’s committee met with Lonoke officials last month to discuss the broken street, but Gaskill said the program doesn’t have any policies in place to address problems like those experienced by Lonoke.

Under the policies in place, Lonoke is unable to apply for any money from the program again until 2017, according to McGee.

But Gaskill said the committee regularly reviews its policies, and he didn’t discount putting in some policies in the future to prevent similar problems.

The Highway Department, meanwhile, is reviewing the project and its documents.

“There is an issue,” said Danny Straessle, an agency spokesman. “We’re still in the investigative phase to determine whether or not there is any liability and who may be responsible for what happened.”

Bennett said she and her constituents are frustrated.

“I don’t want to point fingers,” she said. “I just want it fixed.”

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