City seeks funds to repair Dauphin Street

The city is applying for funding through the Alabama Department of Transportation Rehabilitation and Improvement Program to pay for the more than $3 million in estimated construction costs for the highly travelled streets.

“Dauphin Street is in terrible condition, but there is no simple fix. There are no more than one or two storm drains on the street and when it rains flooding becomes a big issue. I want to repair it correctly instead of wasting money trying to patch it,” Enterprise Mayor Kenneth Boswell said.

Should the city receive grant monies, it will be responsible for matching the grant by 20 percent.

Because the city is in the midst of $2 million street resurfacing project, Boswell said any repairs to Dauphin Street or Shell Field Road would be broken into phases with portions of some needed repairs being postponed until additional funding is available.

Portions of Dauphin Street inside of Boll Weevil Circle would be the first to receive repairs.

Seventy-three streets within Enterprise are currently scheduled to receive patching or be repaved this year.

The project will complete a large portion of the city’s 10-year-old comprehensive plan to repair city streets.

“When we came into office in 2000 we faced a monumental task. There was plenty of work to do and not any money to do it with,” Boswell said.

In the place of using internal services, the city hired a retired ALDOT engineer in 2001 to evaluate and rank city streets in need of repair.

“The best were graded an A and the worst received E,” Boswell said.

City officials following the study took out a $2 million bond to begin the road repairs.

The first phase of the comprehensive plan was completed in 2003 when all of the E-graded streets and some roadways that received a D were repaved.

“We were fortunate that petroleum prices back then were very reasonable,” Boswell said.

City officials wanted to move forward with resurfacing projects in 2004, with an allocated $1 million for the project.

Petroleum prices began to skyrocket, however, in the wake of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, according to Boswell.

Petroleum more than doubled in cost in 2004 and continued an upward spiral throughout the following years when it reached a peak cost of more than $140 in 2008.

“Based on our calculations we would have only been able to pave three to four miles of street. We decided to postpone the project, hoping we would get a better price in the future,” Boswell said.

While waiting to recommence the resurfacing, city officials allocated an additional $1 million for future repaving projects.

“We wanted to be prepared for the time when we had better petroleum prices,” Boswell said. “I feel like we have taken advantage of the economy by waiting for fuel prices to stabilize.”

When city officials sought bids last year to restart the comprehensive plan, petroleum prices had dropped from more than $100 a ton to between $75 and $76.

“We will now be able to resurface 16.6 miles or 87,725 linear square feet,” Boswell said.

When the project begins, all D-grade streets and some C streets will be resurfaced.

“We asked Glenn Morgan, with Poly-Engineering, to go out and assess the streets and affirm that the comprehensive plan still applies. It does,” Boswell said. “No particular part of the city is getting more paving work than another.”