By DELANIA TRIGG, City Editor
Gainesville Daily Register
Gainesville —
Wednesday’s rainy weather may have caused some minor flooding issues in low areas, but it hasn’t had much of an impact on the Broadway Street bridge project.
The completed bridge is set to reopen Friday or early next week, Texas Department of Transportation Area Engineer Mike Hallum said.
“If everything goes right and we can finish painting, it should be opened by the end of this week,” Hallum said in an interview Wednesday morning.
Workers began construction on the Broadway bridge in early April, just days after reopening the newly replaced bridge which spans California Street.
The work coincides with the Pecan Creek Flood Control project — a $12.4 million series of construction projects designed to widen and rechannel sections of Pecan Creek.
While the city of Gainesville and the Army Corps of Engineers are working behind the scenes to get the Pecan Creek project started, TxDOT began the bridge replacements.
The two bridge replacement projects are not related to the Pecan Creek effort, but will complement each other, Hallum said in a previous interview.
“We (were) not replacing the bridges because of the Pecan Creek project, but because of that project we needed to make sure that the bridges fit the plans to widen Pecan Creek. That’s all we (were) doing to Pecan Creek,” Hallum said in April.
He also noted that TxDOT has a full slate of projects planned for Cooke County.
The Interstate Highway 35/U.S. Highway 82 interchange is next on the list of local projects, Hallum said.
The project is expected to let next week.
Hallum said this project is one of the most significant projects planned for the area because it will help eliminate a dangerous interchange.
As it stands, drivers who exit the northbound lanes of I-35 follow a curved entrance ramp to reach Highway 82 where they merge with traffic.
“I call it a death ramp because drivers have to worry about semis and other traffic crowding them,” Hallum said.
He noted that Highway 82 traffic can be heavy.
“In 2007, daily traffic in both directions totaled 28,000 on U.S. Highway 82 east of Interstate 35,” he said.
Traffic on both sides of Interstate 35 which stretches over 1,500 miles from Laredo to Duluth, Minn. — averaged 39,000 vehicles per day in 2007, he said.
The Texas Department of Transportation is paying the lion’s share — $11.3 million — of the $14.3 million project. The Department of Transportation money is part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Approximately $3 million is expected to come from TxDOT’s Wichita Falls district, and the City of Gainesville plans to contribute approximately $55,000 to the project.
The project includes rebuilding all the I-35 interchange ramps, widening the I-35 overpass, adding turnaround on Highway 82 and adding some landscape features.
Hallum said the project will be completed in phases to allow traffic to pass through the area.
“We’re not going to tear it up all at once. The first inconvenience drivers will notice will be a one-way frontage road at the start of construction,” he said.
TxDOT is allowing 400 calendar days for the project.
Other local TxDOT projects include building an overpass across FM 678 and Highway 82 near Callisburg.
Hallum called the overpass project “huge” and said it’s expected to take about 18 months to complete.
