A Lawton company won a contract to improve the mile-long section of 38th Street between Gore and Lee boulevards.
T&G Construction was one of four bidders for the job. Their $4.349 million bid was 22.8% lower than the engineer’s $5.635 million estimate.
Approximately 1,200 square yards of the street will receive a relatively simple mill-and-overlay, records indicate. However, much of the street will receive “deep impact repair,” said Councilman George Gill, chairman of the city ’s Streets and Bridges Committee. That means sections of the street will be torn out down to the dir t for preparation of 1,500 cubic yards of Type A aggregate base (perhaps 2,500 tons of gravel) before new asphalt surfacing is poured.
Schiralli Construction Corp. of Wilson, Oklahoma, submitted the lowest bid: $3.997 million.
However, the council heeded the advice of engineering consultant Chris Serrano of WSB and rejected that bid as “non-responsible due to documented performance concerns and contractual issues with another municipality, which raise substantial doubts” about the company’s ability to “successfully complete the project in accordance with” City of Lawton standards and expectations.
The City of Durant had a project on University Boulevard “comparable to” Lawton’s 38th Street project and reported that Schiralli “exhibited slow progress and performance issues,” Serrano informed Lawton Public Works Director Michael Watrous in a letter dated March 24. Schiralli also had problems completing a project in Coal County, Serrano told the Lawton City Council on March 25.
The 38th Street job will be financed with ad valorem tax receipts, city records reflect.
Rehabilitation of the targeted section of 38th Street has been a high priority for city officials for some time. Ward 1 Councilwoman Mary Ann Hankins said she discussed the project with then-City Manager Jerry Ihler before he retired from the City of Lawton six years ago, in early 2019.
Thirty-eighth is a well-traveled four-lane traffic corridor in Lawton. In 2020 the street carried an average of 13,000 vehicles per day just north of the Ole Kim Lane entrance to Cameron University, and 9,900 vehicles per day a short distance south of Southwest J Avenue, an Oklahoma Department of Transportation traffic study showed.