 - Riverton city staff members recently presented municipal officials with an overview of the construction projects the public works department was able to complete in 2024.){kind=link}
(Riverton, WY) – Riverton city staff members recently presented municipal officials with an overview of the construction projects the public works department was able to complete in 2024.
“This year was a very successful year, I would say, with a lot going on in a little amount of time,” City Engineer and Utility Division Manager Brendan Thoman said during a Riverton City Council meeting in October.
1 percent projects
Thoman began the presentation by outlining the projects that were funded by Fremont County’s optional 1 percent sales tax for infrastructure, which has been in place since 2012 and was renewed again this fall.
The 1 percent sales tax generates roughly $2 million in revenue for Riverton annually, City Administrator Kyle Butterfield said after the tax option passed this year, and that money is “completely and solely dedicated to roads, water, sewer, (and other) infrastructure improvements.”
Without the 1 percent funding, Riverton wouldn’t be able “to allocate that same level of commitment to infrastructure,” Butterfield said, expressing gratitude to local voters for approving the sales tax option again this year.
“We’re very encouraged that it’s going to be around for another four years,” Butterfield said. “Our community will see these funds continue to go towards important improvements (as) we look at the infrastructure needs of the community moving forward.”
This year, Thoman said the sales tax funded five local projects, including:
- Major Avenue/College View Drive
- Arapahoe Drive Improvement Project
- 2024 Concrete Replacement Project
- 2024 Pavement Preservation Slurry Seal Project and Roadway Preparation
- 2024 Pavement Striping
The Major Avenue/College View Drive project was the “most innovative” of the five, he said, explaining that, when it was originally bid in 2022, the scope of work only involved upgrades to Major Avenue – a “highly trafficked” street with “multiple cracks” and areas where “the utilities had sunk,” creating “potholes throughout the road.”
At that time, with inflation causing an increase in construction prices, Thoman said the cost to “mill the roadway down, bring in a reinforcing fabric, and then bring back in a 2-inch layer of asphalt” came in at almost $660,000, so the city “opted not to do the project that year.”
But this year, the project was put out to bid again – and this time it included the “full-depth repair” of two 300-foot sections of College View Drive, one of which was “highly potholed and just an eyesore” and another “which was falling apart and just crumbling,” Thoman said.
Even with those additions, Thoman said the bid for the 2024 project came in at about $560,000 – well below the 2022 bid.
“We actually came out with more of a project (for) less money,” he said.
Because the 2024 bid came in at “a fairly low price,” Thoman said the city decided to add to the project, expanding the scope to include “a large portion of College View Drive” between Sunset Drive and Brunton Court, for a total project cost of about $1 million.
Thoman commended local contractors for bringing in a technique called “cold in-place recycling” to help cut down on the cost of the Major Avenue/College View Drive project.
The technique uses a machine called a “roadway reclaimer” to “pulverize … the roadway” and “essentially make our own base material,” Thoman said, adding that contractors also utilized a “geotechnical fabric” as part of the project in order to reduce the amount of road base required by several inches.
A “similar process” was utilized on Arapahoe Drive, where Thoman said crews “were able to pulverize the entire road,” then “re-compact” it and “put it back down” to “build the roadway structure back up” before applying 3 inches of asphalt.
They also replaced one culvert as part of the project, which cost a total of about $235,000, according to Thoman’s presentation.
The 2024 Concrete Replacement Project cost about $345,000 and focused on common “drainage surplus” areas around curbs, gutters, and alley approaches in order to help the city “manage our storm water off the roadways (and) increase the life of our roadways,” Thoman said.
That project also resulted in the installation of nine ADA-accessible ramps with “detectable warning devices,” he said.
City staff had projected that the 2024 Slurry Seal Project would cost about $450,000 based on last year’s numbers, Thoman said, but because “we were able to bid it out sole-source with a different bidder from last year,” the price tag was lower: about $260,000 to cover 102,000 square yards of roadway in the downtown area, on Lincoln and Jackson streets, and in the College View area.
Last year, by contrast, Thoman said the city paid about $250,000 to cover 71,300 square yards of roadway.
To prepare for this year’s slurry seal operation, Operations Division Manager Dan Adcock said city crews applied 1.25 tons of crack seal in the project area, and they used 3,600 gallons of durapatch emulsion and 55 tons of rocks to fill potholes in the area, too.
“That is quite a bit more than what we do on an average year,” Adcock said. “But the roads needed it, and getting those things filled up really helps that slurry seal be effective.”
Crews also swept over 90 miles of street this spring and summer “to try and keep the roads clean so the slurry seal would go down easy,” he said, and “we applied about 40 tons of asphalt (in) areas around town, to just fix mainly water leak holes, large potholes, that sort of thing.”
Finally, the city’s 2024 Pavement Striping Project included 12.5 miles of center lines and fog lines and 86 crosswalks – new and old, Adcock said.
“Along with that we also did all of the curb painting, both yellow and blue, from along Main Street from Federal to North Eighth West,” he said. “We got a lot of good paint out there so people can see … what’s going on.”
Capital projects
In addition to the 1 percent infrastructure projects, Adcock also mentioned some of the capital projects the city completed this year using budgeted funds.
For example, he said, city employees were able to up-fit two plow/sander/dump trucks in 2024 – “a big undertaking for the public works department” and “a good experience for us.”
“This was the first time that we have taken an up-fit process of that magnitude and done it in-house,” Adcock said. “We put these trucks together from the chassis up, (and) we saved $15,000 per unit over what it would have taken us to have someone else do that. … That was a very cost-effective way to do it.”
The cab and chassis of each truck cost about $135,000, Adcock said, and the equipment being added – like sanders and hydraulic controls – cost about $78,000.
The city also funded two drainage projects in 2024, Adcock said, including one that replaced a storm drain on Smith Road that “failed about two years ago” near Park Avenue.
“It was kind of a tough job,” Adcock said. “They had to take a 24-inch plastic pipe and put it underneath a 36-inch sanitary sewer line that’s running about half-full 24/7 – so no mistakes there. (And) once they got through that sewer line, then they had to go underneath a 6-inch high-pressure gas line … which is also kind of tricky.”
The other drainage project, which Adcock called “equally impressive,” replaced a storm drain on Webbwood Road that carries water from a retaining pond at 16th Street east to Smith Road.
The drainage pipe feeding the storm drain had been “piecemealed together back in the day,” Adcock explained, and for “a lot of the pipe there was no bottom,” so “trying to jet it and keep that storm drain open was a real difficult task.”
Plus, he said, “that old pipe ran underneath about eight different homes along the way – so, not a good plan.”
Now the pipe has been replaced, and Adcock said the 16th Street retention pond “has been empty ever since.”
“That’s exactly what we want to try to accomplish,” he said. “We like to get the storm water out of the way quickly, because we don’t need it backing up everywhere.”
Adcock concluded the presentation by mentioning “a couple other things that we did this year,” including:
- replacing the All-Nations lift station “with a more modern unit” that is “more able to be repaired and maintained”
- upgrading the city’s bulk water filling station from a coin-operated system to a credit card operated system
- installing new equipment that make it possible to “automatically read meters from … anywhere around town”
- replacing 100 feet of water line on East Jefferson Avenue that broke a couple of years ago
- replacing incandescent light bulbs in the Main Street and City Park areas with LED lights that are “way more energy efficient”
For more information, call the City of Riverton at (307) 856-2227.