End of the road: Nederland Avenue completion in sight.
Published 5:15 pm Wednesday, November 21, 2018
By Chris Moore
NEDERLAND — After a rainy late summer and early fall delayed progress, the Nederland Avenue project is nearing its end.
Director of Public Works Robert Woods said at a city council meeting the project should begin wrapping up within the next couple of weeks.
“They have completed the base repair through the remaining portion on Nederland Avenue,” Woods said. “There is still a little bit of areas where they need to do the crack seal. They will be working on that this week. They have mobilized all of their equipment on site to get ready for the paving operation. That will get kicked off next week.”
Woods said the final the workers will put the final dry surface down on the week of Dec. 3.
“They’ll put the pavement down on Dec. 10 and start putting markers down the next week,” Woods said.
City manager Chris Duque said the project is still tracked to come in under budget.
“We’ll be closing out the project by the
second council meeting in
January at the very latest,” Duque said. “Once we do that, we’ll probably be doing a budget amendment to transfer unspent funds into 2019 streets budget or continue rolling it over to another possible mega project — road project. It all stays in streets.”
The project began in the spring and was scheduled to be completed by the end of October, originally, but inclement weather forced multiple delays on the final completion date.
The city of Nederland was awarded a Community Development Block Grant in the amount of $4.2 million for local infrastructure and 2.1 million for local buyouts or acquisitions.
Per usual with block grant money, the city is required to spend 70 percent of the local infrastructure fund on low-to-moderate income neighborhoods.
“In the past, we have been able to qualify specific neighborhoods via door-to-door surveys,” Duque said. “Unfortunately, the city cannot automatically use the 30 percent of the infrastructure funds non-LMI neighborhoods until utilizing the other 70 percent.”
The city manager said he has not received any inquiries for the buyout/acquisition program.
“If we don’t use our funds, they will go back to the regional planning commission to reallocate,” Duque said.
