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Commissioner Jeff Rader
Manuel J. Maloof Center
1300 Commerce Drive
5th Floor
Decatur, GA 30030
(404) 371-2863
jrader@co.dekalb.ga.us
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| Public Works Department Director's Update |
| Jul 3, 2006 |
Construction Projects:
Work on the Transportation Bond-funded sidewalks is continuing to meet the 2006 schedule:
Briarcliff Road, south side, from Briarlake Road to Lakeside High School is just getting started; project should be complete by August 4, 2006.
Sidewalk contractors have been given notices to proceed for:
Jody Lane, east side, from LaVista Road to Holly Drive; work should be completed by September 8, 2006.
Dresden Drive, south side, from Thompson Road to Apple Valley Road; work should be completed by September 8, 2006.
After these locations are completed, there will be about 15 sidewalk projects left to complete from the 2006 schedule, for a total of about 24 miles of new sidewalks constructed in 2006.
The bids for about 40-miles of Bond-funded resurfacing were received by Purchasing on Thursday, June 8, and should go to the Board on July 11 for award; the low bids for the three different packages totaled about $17 million in resurfacing work. In addition, the 2007 LARP bids for about 22 miles of resurfacing in DeKalb County were received by GDOT on June 16.
The Roads & Drainage Traffic Engineering crews have continued to make good use of the new striping truck. Work was recently completed on Valley View Road, Heaton Park Drive, and Moonlight Trail. Next in the queue for striping in the next several weeks will be work on Stone Mountain Lithonia Road, North Decatur Road, Old Norcross Road, North Druid Hills Road, New Peachtree Road, Peeler Road, Curtis Drive, Flowers Road, Harts Mill Road, Dresden Drive, Roberts Drive and Pleasantdale Road. Year-to-date, they have completed 262,112 feet of roadway striping with the new truck. They're also complete with Preventative Maintenance on 497 of the 600+ traffic signals in the County.
Buford Highway sidewalks and safety improvements, from Shallowford Terrace in Chamblee to I-285 in Doraville, are 70% complete; the contractor is complete with most of the sidewalks, the landscaping (although much of it died during the heat/dry weeks and will have to be replaced), and the street lighting. The majority of work remaining includes the pedestrian medians/refuge islands. The contractor will be given a time extension by GDOT past the substantial completion date of July 31, 2006, because of some delays in final approval of their detail submittals on the in-road pedestrian lighting and safety devices.
Other major projects on schedule to bid in 2006:
Ponce de Leon Avenue at Hambrick; bids were opened on this project on May 19, but an award announcement has not yet been made. The apparent low bid was for about $1.9 million. This project includes turn lane improvements and signal upgrades.
Ponce de Leon Avenue at McLendon; turn lane construction and signal upgrades to improve traffic safety and efficiency; all the necessary rights-of-way have been acquired by the County. The McLendon project has slipped to an August 2006 letting due to some outstanding issues that GDOT is resolving with the CSX Railroad.
The Roads & Drainage storm water crews have completed the 50 high-priority drainage system repairs scheduled for this 2nd quarter. Some of the major projects completed in the last month included:
Pipe liners on Cliff Valley Way and Cody Circle
In the next few weeks, work will start on construction of one of the capacity improvement projects on Tobey Road near the PDK Airport, on repairs to the storm system on River Oaks Drive.
The Methane Gas to Electricity project at the Landfill is about 20% complete, and is on schedule for its required completion by October 2006, to meet the County's contractual deadline with Georgia Power to begin producing electricity at that time; the contractor has ordered the generators, the building pad is finished and the grounding grid is installed. They will start forming the building slab this week.
Customer Service and Community Outreach:
Roads & Drainage received word from the Georgia Emergency Management Agency that FEMA selected one of DeKalb County's Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant applications, for nine homes on Gainsborough Drive, for selection in the 2006 federal program; final reviews are going on at the federal level, but it appears the County will be receiving over $2 million in additional grant funds from FEMA for this flood-prone home buyout project along the Nancy Creek watershed.
Environmental Quality:
The Sanitation Division's subscription curbside recycling program now has over 9,056 households participating, and has diverted more than 1500 tons of recylable material from the Landfill.
Roads & Drainage Division turned in a very comprehensive Annual Report for July 2005-June 2006 time period, for the Storm Water system NPDES permit, to EPD, in mid-June. They were able to report significant new information about the education/outreach programs, the assessment and inventory of the system, the detention pond inspection and maintenance programs, and the coordination of erosion control programs with Development Department, and the water quality monitoring programs done by the Water/Sewer Department WPC Laboratory. In addition, they were able to report the important progress made in coordinating the programs of each of the 8 co-permittee cities, and EPD seems satisfied with the updates and expansions to the programs. |
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