FAYETTEVILLE -- The remedial work being done to two Washington County bridges can serve as a model for any major bridges the county builds in the future, the Road Department assistant superintendent told county officials Monday.
The rural Harvey Dowell and Stonewall bridges were two stops along an all-afternoon tour of county roads and projects for nine of the 15 Quorum Court members. In the next two months or so, the Quorum Court will decide how much county taxpayer money to devote to roads and other services next year.
The county has been working to shore up the two bridges since construction and safety concerns came to light earlier this year. County investigators in May found crews ignored parts of their engineering plans and cast and laid concrete and steel in ways that shorten the bridges' lifespans. Road Department officials said the county had been building bridges the same way for decades.
Both crossings could be done by the end of the year, assistant road superintendent Shawn Shrum said, with Harvey Dowell done in the next few weeks and Stonewall possibly done by November or so.
At Harvey Dowell, outside southeast Fayetteville, contractors have wrapped shells of new concrete around the bridge's two columns, or piers, and in front of one of its end walls -- crews are about to do the same for the other end wall, Shrum said. Then county workers will strengthen the steel guardrail, which was a point of concern because the original design called for a concrete barrier along the road's sides.
"A guardrail has the same purpose as a curb: You hit, then bounce off," Shrum told several justices of the peace as a crew continued working around them.
At Stonewall, outside Prairie Grove's west limit, crews have rebuilt two piers and have begun placing steel beams across them. Shrum said the bridge is at about the same point as in March, when County Judge Marilyn Edwards ordered the piers to be torn down and redone because of their problems.
Several groups are working together to finish the jobs.
Iowa Bridge & Culvert, which employs a project manager in West Fork, serves as a consultant for the Stonewall project for $200 an hour. Fayetteville-based GTS Inc. tests the structure's integrity, and engineer Jim Beatty approves each stage of the project.
Meanwhile, Harvey Dowell Bridge, completed by the county in 2013, is being reinforced by Benchmark Construction workers. The Fayetteville company submitted the lowest of five bids at $166,500, Edwards said earlier this year. The contract swells Harvey Dowell's original $415,000 cost by 40 percent, but comes to about 2 percent of the Road Department's 2015 budget.
Joel Maxwell, Republican justice of the peace for District 13 in western Washington County, raised the question that has been debated for much of the year: Should the county be building bridges like these? Many Arkansas counties contract for projects of this scale, and the two bridges are the biggest the county has built in recent memory. Edwards has said she doesn't plan on building any more for the rest of this term, her last.
"Does it make sense to have a specialist for something we don't do very often?" Maxwell asked Shrum at the Stonewall site.
Shrum replied the county first should rebuild its bridge crew; several members, included the lead man, quit or retired during the controversy. Bridges built privately would cost more, largely because the county's labor in a sense is already paid for, he added.
A sort of hybrid approach, with a full- or part-time county supervisor and county workers coordinating with companies like GTS and Benchmark, could be the best approach, Shrum said.
"So going forward, that'll be part of the process," agreed Daniel Balls, a Fayetteville Democrat on the Quorum Court, referring to private involvement.
Shrum and Edwards also took the justices Monday to several paved and gravel county roads and explained why some roads can't be paved, at least for now, despite residents' wishes. Sometimes the county can't get the needed right of way from all of a street's residents, Shrum said, or utility pipes run along the route, requiring costly accommodations.
The tour's last stop was at the county's limestone quarry near Morrow in the county's southwest. The county has been getting the gravel base for its roads from the pit for at least two decades.
NW News on 09/29/2015