Bumpy Broadway stretch up for resurfacing in Little Rock

A jarring and heavily traveled section of Broadway in downtown Little Rock is getting a $373,000 face-lift.

The Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department received a low bid of $373,696.85 on Wednesday to resurface the street between West Markham Street and Interstate 630. The section is just a little more than a half-mile long but its worn and pothole-marred surface metes out punishment to 26,000 vehicles a day.

"I'd probably be hard-pressed to come up with another [city street] in that condition with that volume of traffic," said Jon Honeywell, the public works director for the city.

Except Broadway, technically, isn't a city street. It is actually part of a state-maintained route, U.S. 70, and the city is unable to do any work on it.

But the city got the majority of the complaints about the quality of the road surface, or lack thereof.

"We've gotten quite a lot of phone calls about that," Honeywell said. "So we're certainly happy the Highway Department moved it up on its schedule. They've been aware of it, but they can only do so much with the money they've got."

Danny Straessle, a spokesman for the Highway Department, said his agency has heard plenty, too.

"We did have a lot of requests that we do something about this," he said. "It is a high-traffic corridor into the downtown area."

The department opened bids on it and 45 other projects Wednesday. Of the 11 state projects in the letting, only one other was smaller. A project to resurface and add a turn lane to a section of Arkansas 321 in Cabot received a low bid of $122,345 from The Rogers Group Inc. of Nashville, Tenn.

The Broadway project received only one bid, from Redstone Construction Group Inc. of Little Rock. The bid won't be accepted until agency officials review its accuracy.

Under the terms of the contract, the contractor will grind down, or mill, the top 2 inches of asphalt and replace, or inlay, it with 2 inches of new asphalt on the five lanes for the nine-block section to keep the street level with the curbs and gutters.

The work should begin, if the Redstone bid is accepted, within four to six weeks and take until the end of the year to complete, Straessle said.

Motorists, no doubt, will notice and likely appreciate the difference in ride quality, he said.

"It will look like a brand new road, basically," Straessle added. "It will be a nice, resurfaced road."

Metro on 08/11/2016