Monitor staff
Nearly two years after the city cut the ribbon on its new Main Street, its crews have begun patching some of its crosswalks.
Concord General Services workers were out last Monday and Tuesday ripping up bricks and pouring concrete and asphalt at the junction of North Main and Pleasant streets.
City Engineer David Cedarholm said the concrete slab on Pleasant Street needed to be fixed because it was cut through during a water main repair last year. The work is a precursor to fixing four crossings where bricks have buckled due to either drainage problems or wear and tear on Main Street.
That work will begin this week, Cedarholm said, weather permitting. He anticipated all four crosswalks, as well as some miscellaneous work, will be completed by Thanksgiving.
The crosswalks were part of the city’s vision for the downtown project completed in 2016, a task that included 5,250 square yards of bricks and granite pavers and 2.37 miles of granite curbing.
But the crosswalks on North Main Street were completed in 2015, a year before the south side of Main Street was finished.
That means the two-year warranty the city had with contractor Severino Trucking has expired, putting the city on the hook for repairs. Severino had done repairs to the crosswalks when the warranty was active.
The measure to pave over the crosswalk is just temporary. The city has plans to give heavy-duty structural makeovers to the crosswalks located where North Main Street meets Pleasant, Warren and Depot streets, as well as the crosswalk across from the Capital Plaza building.
All of the downtown’s 23 crosswalks were constructed with a concrete slab topped with an inch of compacted sand and then brick.
Crosswalks near Warren and Depot streets, as well as the one in front of the Capital Plaza, have been affected by drainage and wear. Main Street is a flat spot on an otherwise gradual slope, and that has caused water to puddle and wash away the sand used in some spots. Without the sand, some bricks have come loose and shifted.
The permanent fix will be a “heavy-duty paver design,” which layers an inch of an asphalt mix on top of the existing concrete slab, followed by the bricks. The city will also fix the grading on three of the crosswalks, which Cedarholm has said will solve the drainage problem.
To fix all four crosswalks will cost an estimated $45,000. The money will come from the Main Street Complete Streets Construction project, which had about $160,000 left in the spring. The project had about $1.1 million from its $14.2 million budget left over when the project was formally declared finished in November 2016.
Bids for the project closed in late September, according to city documents.
Southbound traffic on North Main Street was detoured down Depot Street as the work was performed.
