If all goes according to plan, and Mother Nature cooperates, crews could be ready to reopen the north half of U.S. 54 through downtown Iola within the next few weeks.
Iola Assistant City Administrator Corey Schinstock provided a brief update to City Council members Monday.
With concrete poured for the roadway in place, work has shifted to side street approaches, curbs and streetlight and stoplight electric infrastructure, Schinstock said.
“By the end of this week or the first part of next week, you should start seeing curbs being formed,” Schinstock said, followed by sidewalk grading on the north side of the street.
Once the north side is complete, crews will immediately turn their focus to the south side of the thoroughfare, from McDonald’s Restaurant to Buckeye Street.
Untimely rains during the early portions of the concrete pours have pushed back progress “a couple of weeks behind the target date,” Schinstock said.
Still, contractors are optimistic the downtown portion will be “substantially” completed on both sides by mid-October, just in time for Farm-City Days.
“We should have the mainline done,” he said. “There may be some sidewalks and handicap ramps still to go, but that shouldn’t affect Farm-City Days at all, as far as the parade goes.”
Councilwoman Kim Peters forwarded a question she’s fielded from locals: Why does the work run only Monday through Friday?
That’s because construction workers are like any other hourly employees, and would rack up substantial amounts of overtime, Schinstock and City Administrator Matt Rehder explained.
“If they want to do something like that, then we’d have to fork over a whole lot more money,” Rehder said.
IN A RELATED matter, Schinstock said Iola city crews should be complete with their annual chip-seal work in the northeast quadrant of town by the end of the week.
COUNCILMAN Jeremiah Ivy had another construction project on his mind at Monday’s meeting: the planned 10-megawatt data center going up west of Russell Stover Chocolates.
Crews had begun construction of a metal building that would house the data center last winter, but the site has largely sat vacant for the past few months.
A visit to the job site Tuesday morning may have found the answer.
Arriving work crews from Kanmoco, a building company based in Overbrook, said they’d been working at a job site in Baldwin City for the past several weeks, and now that it’s finished, have returned to Iola to resume work.
