By DON FLETCHER
News Staff Writer
Atmore City Council members awarded during their January 14 meeting the engineering bid for a massive, city-wide street paving project that will put new surfaces on parts of eight streets.
According to documents provided by City Clerk Becca Smith, the total projected cost of the project, including $17,500 for “mobilization and traffic control,” is $645,734.
The list of streets scheduled for new surfaces includes Oak Hill Avenue, Short Street, Church Street, 2nd Avenue, 1st Avenue, Forest Hill Drive and Brookwood Road. Mayor Jim Staff added one more to the list.
“I’d kind of like to add a piece of one (to the list),” Staff said prior to the council’s unanimous vote to award the engineering bid to Civil Southeast. “It’s Howard Street, from Short Street to Main Street; we want to get the white stripe in the right place.”
After the meeting, Staff said he at first didn’t want to include Forest Hill Drive, but engineers alerted him to the importance of doing so.
“We’ll probably take some of the striping off to cut costs,” he said. “On Short and Brookwood, we’ll probably have to do that. The rest of them, probably not. I wasn’t going to do Rollercoaster Road (Forest Hill), but when it came up the engineer said it probably wouldn’t last another year, it’s falling apart so bad.”
Staff didn’t say when the project would begin.
The projected cost of repaving each scheduled street:
Oak Hill Ave., from Main St. to Peachtree St. ($16,553); Short St. ($100,830); Church St. ($229,960); 2nd Ave. ($22,429); 1st Ave., from Pine St. to McRae St. ($38,319); Forest Hill Dr. ($100,713); Brookwood Rd. ($58,730). No cost estimate was provided for the work on Howard Street.