Right on schedule, the detour around Cook Street will end today, capping off more than five months of work on the road.
Department of Transportation officials said signs indicating the detour will be taken down sometime today. Some minor work on the project will be done later this month, but commuters will - for the first time since April - be able to drive along Highway 33 through downtown Portage to and from Pardeeville.
"We're going to open the road," said Robert Lemcke, project engineer with the state Department of Transportation and one of the DOT crew members overseeing the Portage project.
Crews from James Peterson Sons of Medford have been in the city since mid-April, when a detour around downtown Portage went into effect. The detour had non-local drivers going through Wyocena and Pardeeville to get around the construction project.
Most work centered on the commercial district of the road, from Wisconsin Street to Adams Street. The road was redesigned with bump-out parking spaces, multicolored sidewalks and crosswalks, and decorative lampposts.
Work on the commercial section finished on schedule July 31. Paving on the residential section of the road, from Adams Street to the Columbia County Jail, finished earlier this month. A new guardrail was put on the railroad bridge section of Cook Street.
In the entire stretch of the project, new water and sewer mains were put in. Work still left to be done includes tree planting in the residential section and new traffic lights at the intersection of Cook and DeWitt streets to replace temporary signals and poles there now. Both projects are scheduled to be done in mid-October.
"There are some odds and ends that the contractor still has to do, but that won't affect the opening," said Bob Redelings, the city's director of public works/utilities manager.
Monday, the contractor and DOT officials were "watching the rain mostly," waiting on the new traffic lights and trees on order and watching how new sod and seed would take hold, Lemcke said. Today, after DOT officials inspect the road, a contractor will take down the detour signs.
Lemcke said he expects traffic to be back up to normal volume today, based on what happened with the commercial section in August.
"That's the one thing we noticed about the downtown - it's full of cars," Lemcke said.
With the opening today, the Cook Street project will meet its two deadlines - Aug. 1 for the commercial and Oct. 1 for the residential.
"It went as planned, as scheduled," Lemcke said.
The project was budgeted at $2.67 million, with the state paying about $2 million and the city picking up the rest. The final project cost has not yet been calculated.
"Those final numbers won't come in for a while," Redelings said, adding that "it probably won't be until next year" that the city receives a bill from the state.
James Peterson Sons getting high marks from city
In addition to its work on the Cook Street project, contractor James Peterson Sons of Medford is getting high marks from the city for Wisconsin Street water main upgrades.
In one of several upcoming phases to upgrade water pressure in the first ward, the city spent $237,000 to replace and install water mains along Wisconsin Street in the vicinity of Pauquette Street.
James Peterson Sons initially told the city the project might take longer than normal because of excessive groundwater due to heavy summer rains. But when the project started in late August, the groundwater had receded tremendously and work finished early - in mid-September, said Bob Redelings, Portage's director of public works/utilities manager.
"It went really well," Redelings said.
The project replaced four-inch pipes with 12-inch lines. Similar projects are in the planning stages for other neighborhoods in the area.
