Downtown merchants will have to wait awhile to see fresh pavement on Garnett Street.
The repaving of Henderson’s main street from Dabney Drive to Andrews Avenue is on hold because of the uncertain financial situation in Raleigh, where the General Assembly is confronting a potential budget shortfall of $1.2 billion. The project is part of Gov. Mike Easley’s North Carolina Moving Ahead program, which uses money from the highway construction trust fund to repair state roads.
City Engineer Frank Frazier said he thought the repaving project would begin this spring, but he got word this month that the work has not been scheduled.
“We’re going to push them,” he said.
The repaving project is a significant improvement for downtown merchants, said Sheri Jones, the city’s Main Street Program manager. Alan Norwood, the owner of The Java House and a Garnett Street landlord, has said he’s looking forward to smoothing the path downtown for Hendersonians.
Jones said one of the key elements will be raising the level of the street. The curbs tower over the street for most of the downtown section of Garnett.
The milling down of several inches of road surface, the rebuilding of the surface and the repaving will cost $920,000, said Michael Kneis, a division project manager for the state Department of Transportation.
“We’re waiting to see with the funding this year,” said Kneis, who added that the work should get done next year if not this year.
“It may be far off,” said Steve Winstead, the Department of Transportation district engineer for the area that includes Vance County. He said there’s just no way to know right now.
In the meantime, some work is moving ahead on Garnett Street.
The city is fixing up the water pipes in the area, Frazier said, because, inevitably, if the city didn’t do that work before the repaving, pipes would burst after the road reconstruction, and the fresh asphalt would have to be torn up. Andy Perkinson, who is leading operations for the Public Utilities Department in the absence of a director, told the City Council last week that he has crews working every Tuesday and Wednesday night along Garnett Street.
Winstead is overseeing a gradual project to build wheelchair ramps through the curbs to the sidewalks — work that Kneis said must come before the repaving. The cost of the ramps is $60,000 to $65,000, Winstead said.
Those ramps also will be a nice improvement downtown, Jones said.
The work on the wheelchair ramp has been going on for two or three months and should be finished within another month, Winstead said.