First, and importantly, thank you to everyone in the community who has shown patience, understanding, and appreciation for the work currently taking place on some of our most traveled roadways in the borough. Each year, as I have discussed in prior musings, we aim to repair and re-pave a significant portion of our aging infrastructure to ensure our community is maintaining our commitment to improving our community.
This year, Church Road, South Line Street, East Sixth Street, South Broad Street, Walnut Street, West Eighth Street, and North Valley Forge Road, are all actively slated for redevelopment.
Tearing up miles of roadway is never an easy task in a community that is as busy as ours. We are, inevitably, interfering with people’s everyday lives and interrupting everyone’s daily routines. I know how grating that can be and the cascade of challenges it can create when your day is thrown off by construction and delays. Again, and I cannot say this enough, thank you for showing grace during these alterations and improvements, they are critical to improving our community.
Obviously, there is never a good time to tear up a main roadway. However, planning for roadwork is dependent on a few critical criteria. The first is always the contract that has been entered into during the bidding process. Contracts are bid on with a “completion window,” meaning that we, the borough, will be flexible on the start/end dates of a project so that the best contractor can place the best price on their work when it makes most sense to them. This allows for cost savings on our side, fulfilling our fiduciary responsibilities, while also ensuring quality contractors are not eliminated from the pool of applicants due to cost. This flexibility does, at times, result in projects that have longer durations. They are not ideal situations by any means, which is why our public works team works diligently with contractors to avoid these situations.
Finally, and the most frustrating, is the weather and access to material. We cannot tear up roadways and lay new asphalt in the rain, and we cannot do the work without the material to put down. All the roadways listed above were scheduled, originally, to begin construction prior to Labor Day. However, due to the ongoing challenges of obtaining asphalt and then some days of heavy rain, delays occurred which pushed back our construction windows.
As a reminder, if you are interested in receiving notifications from the borough in general, you can sign up to be alerted on upcoming roadwork, snow emergencies, etc. You can be notified by email and/or text by signing up on our website and clicking “Notify Me” on the footer of any page.
As we come to the end of summer and, hopefully, the swift completion of our construction season, we can all begin to enjoy the improved infrastructure in our community. Less bumps in the road, fewer spilled coffees, and fewer teeth clenching, steering wheel grasping, soul punishing, potholes that we all want eliminated from our community once and for all we will be a better place to live, work, and play, once these improvements are completed and it will be worth every delay and detour we have endured.
(Mayoral Musings is a weekly op-ed column submitted to North Penn Now, courtesy of Lansdale Borough Mayor Garry Herbert. The views expressed are his own and are not representative of North Penn Now or Lansdale Borough.)
See also:
Mayoral Musings: The Closing of Rite Aid at Main and Broad
Mayoral Musings: The Promise of Private/Public Partnerships In EMS Funding
Mayoral Musings: Susquehanna and Courtland to Change to Two-Way Traffic This Month
Mayoral Musings: National Night Out is Tonight!
Mayoral Musings: What The Borough Can (And Can't) Do To Preserve History
