MANSFIELD — Richland County commissioners on Thursday approved $1.1 million in county road improvements during a meeting with county Engineer Adam Gove.
Commissioners awarded two contracts to Earthworm Construction of Iberia, which submitted the lowest bids for each of the two projects, according to the engineer.
The first contract for $458,078 was for chip-and-seal work on 16.2 miles of county roads, a project Gove had estimated at $460,500. There were three bids submitted for the work.
He said the work will include Taylortown Road, Hastings Road, Neuville Road, Swigert Road, Dinninger Road, Myers Road, Horning Road and Springmill West Road.
Gove said the work would likely by done in August.
“This will be paid out of county engineer funds for road and bridge maintenance,” he said.
Commissioners then awarded a cold constructed asphalt pavement contract to Earthworm for $692,004. It was the lowest of two bids submitted and was about 5 percent higher than Gove’s estimate of $659,226.
CCAP is a type of cold mix asphalt technology used for road construction and rehabilitation, particularly on lower-traffic rural and secondary roads.
Gove said the project will resurface about 8.7 miles of county roads including Champion, Beam and Bunker Hill North Roads. He said the project is partially funded by a grant from the Ohio Public Works Commission.
“We have been using the cold constructed asphalt on some of our lower volume roads, more rural areas, over the last five years,” the engineer said.
“It’s performed well. It’s a little bit cheaper to lay down. It’s more economical resurfacing than just hot mix asphalt. It’s proven over the last five years to be a pretty good product,” Gove said.
He said the CCAP work would likely be done in September.
Contract approved with K.E. McCartney for sanitary engineering consulting
Also on Thursday, commissioners approved a two-year contract for up to $20,000 to K.E. McCartney to provide sanitary engineering consulting services for the county’s wastewater treatment department.
The vote came during a meeting with Amanda Miller, the director of the department.
“(McCartney) has been a great help over the years. They’ve helped us off and on with questions that we have from time to time that are outside my expertise,” Miller said.
She cited a recent instance when her department had an issue with a pump.
“We couldn’t trace down what was going on in the system and from an engineering standpoint, we didn’t realize what was happening.
“We thought it was going off the curve in one direction and it turned out that the pressure was going in another direction, that we didn’t even think of. It wasn’t something that we would have caught without them giving us some pointers to what to look for,” Miller said.
“I gave them the data that we had and they gave us information back to look for. They came to a conclusion, gave us more things to look for, and we were able to prove it and solve the problem,” she said.
