A project to widen a busy section of Kanis Road in Little Rock -- the biggest project Little Rock has ever undertaken using only city money -- is taking longer than first envisioned.
At a June 2014 public hearing, the first for the project that will transform the mostly two-lane road into a modern multilane thoroughfare, city officials said they expected construction to begin in 2015 or 2016.
Try 2017.
Offers are only now being made to acquire the 52 parcels of land to begin widening a section of Kanis west from South Shackleford Road to South Bowman Road and on to Gamble Road.
Mike Hood, civil engineering manager for the city Public Works Department, said last week that he expects acquiring rights of way won't wrap up until the end of the year, at the earliest.
By then, "We will know very well where we stand with it," he said.
Acquiring the rights of way illustrates the complexities of transforming the route from a two-lane road with no shoulders to a multilane arterial with curbs, gutters and drainage.
The cost of the right of way is now approaching $2 million, he said.
The widening project "does for sure have an impact" on the properties lining the route, particularly those on the north side of the road. They sit lower than the roadway, which will require retaining walls or slopes to support it on the north side, Hood said. "It's a big job."
The parcels likely range in price from as a little as a few thousand dollars to as much as $300,000, the latter likely for a big piece of undeveloped property fronting Kanis, he said.
At least one and possibly two properties will require relocation, Hood said.
Hood said he has signed 13 offers so far.
The project is actually two projects divided between Ward 6, represented on the city board by Doris Wright, and Ward 5, represented by Lance Hines.
The Ward 6 section is between Shackleford and Bowman, a section that is a little less than a mile long. The two-lane Kanis roadway would be widened to five lanes.
Kanis west from Bowman to Gamble Road is in Ward 5. That section, which is slightly less than a half-mile long, would be widened to three lanes.
The estimated total cost is about $12 million and, of that, $8.3 million will be for construction. About $5.4 million has already been allocated for the project, which likely will be enough to build west from Shackleford to the intersection of Embassy Suites and Centerview drives, Hood said.
The money is coming from proceeds from a city bond issue and from the city's share of the temporary statewide o.5 percent sales tax Arkansas voters approved in 2012.
Most of the money raised from the tax, which will be in place for 10 years, is helping finance $1.8 billion of road construction, which has been dubbed the Connecting Arkansas Program. But a significant share of the tax is going to the state's cities and counties.
The remainder of the project likely will be built after another round of funding becomes available in 2018, Hood said.
The latest design eliminates a traffic circle that would've been built at Embassy Suites and Centerview, he said.
The intersection didn't warrant a traffic signal, so the engineers turned to the traffic circle, which they said would make it easier for traffic on the two minor roads at the intersection to turn left onto Kanis.
Its elimination only came after three separate studies of the intersection, with engineers concluding the benefits of a traffic circle at the intersection don't outweigh the additional costs of building it.
"I would say that it is easily the most studied intersection on the project," Hood said. "In the end we went with a conventional intersection."
For now the project design still doesn't include a traffic signal for the intersection. But Hood said the intersection will be designed to have one installed if future traffic counts warrant it.
At the public hearings, commuters said the improvements are long overdue.
Near Shackleford, Kanis carries about 21,000 vehicles per day, according to city figures. Traffic estimates say that figure will grow to 31,000 by 2034.
Farther west, the count is smaller -- 12,000 daily on Kanis at Kirby Road. But the intersection is the site of a planned apartment development, and its traffic count is expected to be close to what the easternmost section of the project is now -- 18,000 by 2034.
But before construction begins, utilities will have to be relocated once the right of way is acquired, a process that could take an additional nine months, according to Hood.
One of the complications in that work is Central Arkansas Water's plan to replace an aging pipe in the right of way before the new road is built over it. Entergy Arkansas and CenterPoint Energy also will have some lines to relocate, Hood said.
Once construction begins, it likely will take nine months to complete, he said.
Metro on 09/05/2016