Lawton Mayor Stan Booker’s “10 Wins for the Citizens” street repair program launched a year ago gradually grew to 40 residential and arterial thoroughfares, and the City Council recently added two dozen more.
“This group of streets will be known as ‘24 Roads for Even More in ’24,’” said Councilman George Gill, chairman of the city’s Streets, Roads and Bridges Committee.
The newest group of streets includes West Gore Boulevard from 17th Street to 11th Street/Fort Sill Boulevard; Ferris Avenue between Northwest 17th and 19th streets; Northwest Columbia Avenue between 19th Street and Sheridan Road; South Railroad Street between F Avenue and Lee Boulevard; and Northwest Motif Manor Boulevard between 50th Street and Wolf Creek Boulevard.
Most of the 24 streets are slated for a relatively simply mill-and-asphalt-overlay. “Not every street needs to be torn up and replaced,” Gill said. “We need to use cost-effective and life-extending measures to repair our roads and bridges.”
Chris Serrano, project manager with EST civil engineering firm, said resurfacing with asphalt will extend the life of the streets for perhaps five to 10 years, and said a mill-and-overlay project typically “takes about a day and a half to two days” to complete. “The subbase of these streets is still in good condition,” he said.
“The integrity of the roads is good but patching will be required at some locations,” Serrano said. “Some of these streets will require deep impact foundation preparation,” said Gill.
The first 10 streets were completed in February, 19 days ahead of schedule, at a cost of $1.5 million, the councilman said. The next 15 were upgraded in a $5.1 million contract awarded to T&G Construction of Lawton. A $5.1 million contract on the next 15 streets also was awarded to T&G. “Those streets have been approved but we’re waiting for the funding before we start on them,” Gill told Southwest Ledger on Aug. 15.
Street repair projects are underway “from east to west across Lawton, including downtown,” Gill noted.
Booker said he wants those 40 street repair projects finished by Thanksgiving 2024. “We’re ahead of schedule,” Gill said. “We’re going to meet that deadline,” he vowed.
As for the 24 latest streets targeted for attention, “Once the money is there, which will be by October, those streets will go out for bids,” Gill told the Ledger.
The City Council voted earlier this year in favor of a minimum 2% increase from the previous year’s allocated budget for the Streets & Traffic Control Division’s Repair and Maintenance account for street mill-and-overlay and panel replacement projects.
“We will take from other areas to fund the increases,” City Manager John Ratliff said. Each year the “payor” will be a different city department, he said. City officials have adopted this approach because, “We’re having to fix years of neglect and we don’t want this to happen again,” Ratliff said.
Lawton’s streets have suffered from decades of inattention. Priorities established by the municipal committee are based at least in part on a pavement assessment that was completed in 2022. The evaluation concluded that 37.7% of Lawton’s streets were rated “good” to “excellent,” while 62.3% of them were deemed to be in “fair” to “very poor” condition.
The Streets, Roads and Bridges Committee selected “some of the worst streets in Lawton” for mill-and-overlay work, councilman and committee member Kelly Harris said. “We also looked at traffic counts,” which factored into the selection of the streets, and other factors such as whether a street is on a route to a school or a hospital or medical clinic.
The Streets, Roads and Bridges Committee was created in August 2023 to develop an eight-year plan for street and bridge improvements throughout Lawton. The concept was borrowed from the Oklahoma Department of Transportation, which periodically updates its eight-year plan for state bridge and highway improvements.