The Soldotna Public Works Department will be hosting an open house Thursday night in City Hall to review a comprehensive assessment of the city’s roads and gather public input.
Project Manager Lee Frey with the Department says Soldotna hired a consultant to assist in prioritizing street maintenance or repairs for the Inventory and Management Plan.
Frey: “So they did an evaluation of all our existing paved and gravel streets, looking at the conditions of them and then they analyzed that based on the amount of traffic that goes over each road and the age of each road to kind of look at capital projects for the future and when we should be expecting to have to repave a road or redo a gravel road or if we should be looking at upgrading a gravel road to a paved road and looking at some of the costs on that.”
He says the consultants also considered some of the department’s street maintenance practices like plowing, sanding, or grading and will also provide recommendations on those.
Earlier this year the city made an interactive map available on Soldotna’s website where residents could provide suggestions about needed work or upgrades to roads. Frey says staff has compiled those and will take additional public comment at the open house.
Frey: “We got different results from ‘additional street signage’ to ‘pave this road’, maybe ‘connect a road through here’. So it can be anything like that, we’ve got other sections in the plans that talk about roads for the future, or building out roads, developing undeveloped right of ways, things like that or if we should be developing gravel roads into paved roads and making them more of a main road.”
The open house will be from 5:00 – 6:30 pm Thursday, February 11th, in the Soldotna City Hall Council Chamber.
