Two rural Greenwood roads will be under construction for several weeks during the summer while crews make much needed improvements.
After the new Worthsville Road interchange opened in November, semi traffic along Graham and Collins roads has increased. Semis delivering shipments to and from the Precedent South business park have used the two-lane roads frequently, entering and exiting the interstate at Worthsville Road, instead of Main Street.
Both roads are in such poor shape that if improvements aren’t made soon, they may not be able to continue handling the traffic, city engineer Mark Richards said.
“The roads are basically falling apart,” Richards said. “As soon as we can get the work done, we will.”
The work needed includes tearing up the current asphalt and laying a foundation made of a cement mix before adding new layers of asphalt. Each of the projects will take about three weeks to complete, and will be done one at a time, allowing the other to remain open to traffic, Richards said.
The projects have an estimated cost of about $1 million total, and will be paid for with tax dollars from the city’s tax-increment financing or TIF districts, city controller Adam Stone said. The redevelopment commission approved the first step of the project this month: allowing contractors to bid on the work.
The projects should be done by the end of June or beginning of July, Richards said.
Both Graham and Collins roads are included in the city’s plans for $104 million in infrastructure work with a new TIF district for the area around the Worthsville Road interchange. The projects include reconstructing and widening the roads, and adding a center turn lane.
But those projects will be paid for with tax dollars generated by development in the area. And since that development is years away, those projects won’t be done for several years, Richards said.
The projects the city is planning now will rehabilitate the road and be enough of an improvement until those larger projects are done later, Richards said.
“We don’t have a timetable for the reconstruction projects on either of those roads because of the lengthy process it would be to acquire right of ways, design and then rebuild them,” Richards said. “We don’t know what that area will even look like until we get a better idea of what it will look like with development.”
