Corsicana — The first phase of a major construction project along Corsicana’s busy Seventh Avenue will impact motorists starting Monday.

Workers will begin breaking up Seventh Avenue Monday morning for start of the major drainage improvement project, starting near the intersection of 28th Street and Seventh Avenue.

The work will continue for four months as it progresses east to Beaton Street, and should be finished by early or mid-October.

“This is to relocate all the water and sewer lines under the street and right-of-way,” said Elizabeth Borstad, city engineer.

Some of the pipes are currently underneath the pavement, but those will be moved out to the side of the road, or about three feet from the power/telephone poles, which have also been moved farther from the street. All the utilities have to be moved — water, sewer, electricity, telephone, gas and cable. The state project will be to install a 12-foot stormwater drain below the center of the street to allow for the massive amount of runoff collecting on Seventh, which is also Texas Highway 31.

Local business owners have been watching and waiting for this time to arrive for more than a year, with some trepidation.

“When I saw them moving the telephone poles I though ‘Oh, gosh, it’s coming,’” said Dana Collins, owner of Sign Pro. “For me, in this economy, it could be a business breaker.”

Collins said she’s fortunate to have a side entrance to her property that could be used in a pinch, but she worries about the long-term effects of work on Seventh Avenue, particularly on small businesses such as hers that are month-to-month.

“So long as they don’t tear up too much and they’re conscious of the businesses, but gosh having a bypass would have saved a lot,” Collins said. “We’ll just have to deal with it and hopefully we’ll be here when they’re done.”

The Collin Street Bakery could also be affected, said Hayden Crawford, spokesman for the bakery.

“We are worried about what it’s going to do,” he said. “Of course, we’re against any kind of a bypass artery because 31 is where almost all our business drivers are for Corsicana. If people drive around us instead of coming where our businesses are, we’re against that.”

The work will ultimately be good for the city and the drivers along Seventh, but it could have short-term negative effects, he said.

“We just hope the city and state remain responsive to the businesses along the route, so we can give our customers access to our businesses,” he said. “If you decrease customer access, it will decrease employment opportunities and sales tax revenue and it will be bad for the economy. The bottom line is it’s a good thing, but it would impact a lot of us, and almost all negatively.

“And don’t do it until after the Christmas rush for all of us,” he added.

Exactly how long the utility work will take depends on what it looks like under the street. Right now, city officials can only try to piece together diagrams from decades of water and sewer work. The oldest city pipes beneath Seventh Avenue are believed to have been laid in the 1940s and 1950s, Borstad said.

Unlike the state’s work, which will come next year, the city’s work will mostly involve right-lane closures on Seventh.

“Ninety-percent of it is in the right of way,” Borstad said. “Wherever we’re crossing the road, when we can we’ll bore under the road.”

Once the city is finished moving the utilities it will make temporary asphalt repairs to the road, rather than replace the concrete. The state is letting the contract in August on the larger drainage project, which means that work could start as quickly as mid-October, or it could be delayed as late as March.

The state has a six-month delay clause in its contract, to accommodate unforeseen problems on the utility work.

“It’s because if we need additional time we’re not going to be under the big gun,” Borstad said. “The street is so old we don’t know what we’re going to run into when we open up the ground.”

As part of the city’s project, the contractor will take out all the water and sewer lines currently criss-crossing under the street and install one 12-inch water line running along the north side of Seventh, and two new sewer lines along both the south and north sides of the street.

In practical terms what that means is that some side streets will have to be closed at Seventh, and that sometimes water service will be cut off, Borstad said.

“We are going to coordinate with all the businesses out there,” she said.

Only after the city and gas company have finished moving all those pipes will the state come back in and start the real work, a two-year project to fix the drainage problems along Seventh Avenue.

The $2.1 million contract went to CJB Construction out of Granbury. The money is coming out of bonds sold by the city’s water/sewer department. It will be repaid from water and sewer customers of the city.

The short-term pain will be repaid with long-term benefits, Borstad said.

“One good thing that will come out of this is the city will finish this with brand-new utilities, which will be huge for our maintenance department.”

The state’s plan is to take out the street, curb-to-curb in four-block increments, leaving two lanes open at all times.

“We’re doing it in those shorter sections so we don’t have all the businesses disrupted at one time,” said Darwin Myers, area engineer for the Texas Department of Transportation. “If local traffic can avoid (Highway) 31 it will reduce some congestion we have. We know it’s going to be very crowded the whole time.”

    —————

Janet Jacobs may be reached via e-mail at jacobs@corsicanadailysun.com. Want to “Soundoff” on this story? E-mail: soundoff@corsicanadailysun.com