Easy choice on who will pave Silver Beach Road

By MITCH MAERSCH

Ozaukee Press staff

The Belgium Town Board didn’t need to debate which company would finish the work on Silver Beach Road.

Only Payne and Dolan Inc. of Waukesha submitted a bid to do the paving.

Two phases of the project total about $328,000.

The first phase, slated to be done this fall, includes laying a three-inch binder course with three-foot gravel shoulders “to bring up the grade,” Supr. Bill Janeshek said. That cost estimate is nearly $185,000.

Next spring, a two-inch topping will be added to the road and shoulders, for nearly $144,000.

“We’re building that road extra heavy with all the truck traffic and farm equipment that’s going down there. A five-inch asphalt road is really going to be nice,” Town Chairman Tom Winker said.

The board approved the bid from Payne and Dolan, 2-0. Supr. Tom Bichler was absent and excused.

Denny Rahn Excavating Inc. is doing the road reconstruction this summer after submitting the winning bid of nearly $480,000 in April.

The company is expected to start its work late this month or in early August. It told Janeshek it expects the job will take 15 working days to complete.

“He said they have all the confidence that they’ll have no problems. When they come in, they’re going to build it,” Janeshek said.

The town has set deadlines for completion of Denny Rahn Excavating’s work. The majority of the job has to be done by August and the entire project has to be completed by September.

The roughly one-mile stretch of the gravel road from Highway LL to the railroad tracks will be closed during reconstruction.

The town received a Town Road Improvement Grant last spring for $694,000. The town pays anything more than that.

If the cost estimates hold, the entire project will cost about $808,000, meaning the town would pay about $114,000 to do the work.

The town will know more after Denny Rahn Excavating gets to work. Janeshek said his request for proposals included the cost per ton of road-building materials so that price could be locked in. He estimated how much would be needed.

The town is being charged $11.52 per ton of pit run, a type of crushed rock used to fill in roads, and $17.36 per ton to create a 1.25-inch traffic bond for a road base made from limestone.

“That’s why we did a unit price and we did our best guess on how much material we’re going to use,” Janeshek said in April.

“Based on these prices, we were very happy on the numbers.”

Silver Beach Road leads into the Village of Belgium’s industrial park and paving it has been discussed for decades, but other projects took priority. Village officials have made the case that paving the road would be an economic boon, drawing more companies to the park and those already there to expand.

It would also keep semi trucks off of Main Street, the detour route for those who don’t want to drive on a gravel road.

Engineering work on the project was done several years ago, but issues in acquiring land for a retention pond slowed progress, so reconstructing Main Street moved ahead of paving Silver Beach.

Village officials determined paving the road is too expensive, with the village inching too close to its debt limit to take it on without significant grant funding.

The town’s project only covers its portion of the work. The village’s grant application was not approved so it won’t be paving its part.