A busy, billion-dollar year wraps up for Minnesota road repairs

The Minnesota Department of Transportation‘s road construction season is officially grinding to a halt, but that doesn’t mean commuters are out of the woods when it comes to navigating around orange and white traffic cones.

Road construction crews are starting to “button up for the year” in anticipation of the colder weather, Kevin Gutknecht, MnDOT communications director, said on Thursday. Even so, work will continue on any bridges and other projects that won’t be affected greatly by the falling temperatures.

“By and large, the road work will start to close,” Gutknecht said. “It’s kind of that transition time between road construction and snow-and-ice season.”

MnDOT said the 2017 construction season saw $1.1 billion worth of construction on 211 roads and bridges and 57 other projects ranging work meant to make railroad crossings safer to runway improvements at smaller airports in the state. For projects lasting longer than a year, MnDOT’s figures include only work that was done this season.

The season saw workers finish the $626 million St. Croix Crossing between St. Joseph, Wis., and Oak Park Heights, Minn.; and the $240 million Highway 53 relocation in the city of Virginia, Minn.;, among other major projects.

Some projects are still in progress, including work on Interstate 35 West between downtown Minneapolis and Highway 62, and work on Interstate 94 in the Twin Cities’ east and west metro areas.

Tim Worke, CEO of the Associated General Contractors of Minnesota, said the system saw some “significant improvements” in 2017 and “new capacity where motorists and commuters will see value.”

Although summer is over, contractors will “continue to work into the depths of the season in order to get the work done,” Worke added in an email. “A lot of jobs often have hard completion dates with liquidated damages if that date is missed.”

Paving work gets “especially difficult” once the “freeze-up arrives,” but “in general you will see work continue deep into November as long as we do not have seriously cold weather,” Worke added.

Matt Zeller, executive director of the Concrete Paving Association of Minnesota, said it’s risky to work on concrete or asphalt pavement jobs too late in the season because doing so might affect the road’s long-term quality.

Most concrete pavements are designed to last 50 to 75 years, he said. “If we lose 25 years of life due to pushing it, are we better off?” said Zeller, a former MnDOT concrete engineer.

One ongoing source of trouble during the season has been soggy weather.

The 2017 construction season as a whole was “pretty wet,” which set some projects back, Gutknecht said. Even so, “pretty much everything that we planned to get done this year, we got done,” Gutknecht said.

Pat Huston, the Highway 53 MnDOT project manager, said in September that the Highway 53 project was about two months ahead of schedule coming out of winter. Heavy summer rains slowed the work, but it still finished about a month ahead of schedule, he said.

Besides Highway 53, other projects of note include:

• The St. Croix Crossing, a new bridge over the St. Croix River between Oak Park Heights, Minn., and St. Joseph, Wisconsin. Originally scheduled to open in fall 2016, the new bridge instead started carrying traffic on Aug. 2. A team composed of Black River Falls, Wisconsin-based Lunda and Burnsville-based Ames Construction oversaw the work. Gutknecht said MnDOT is “still working with the contractor on questions around the delay,” including its possible effects on the cost. The new bridge replaces the Stillwater Lift Bridge, which is being converted to a bicycle and pedestrian crossing. Plain, Wisconsin-based Edward Kraemer & Sons is the contractor on the lift-bridge conversion.
• Crews are just now dipping their toes into the $239 million “35W@94: Downtown to Crosstown” project, which is intended to improve safety, traffic control and transit service in the I-35W corridor in Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, I-94 construction in the Twin Cities has tested the patience of commuters during the 2017 construction season – and there’s more to come.

“We have been working on roads that carry high volumes of traffic like I-94, I-694 and even Highway 169,” Gutknecht said. “Those are definitely challenging,” but “some of the work on those roads that have a lot of traffic is coming to a close.”