Silver Beach Road bidding process to start

By MITCH MAERSCH

Ozaukee Press staff

The road to pave the Town of Belgium’s portion of Silver Beach Road starts next week.

All three members of the Town Board will be on hand at the road at 10 a.m. Monday, March 20, for a pre-bid meeting at which parameters of the project will be explained.

“Any interested parties or contractors to be bidding on the project need to be there or their bids will not be submitted,” Supr. Bill Janeshek said at the March 6 Town Board meeting.

Town Chairman Tom Winker then suggested he and Supr. Tom Bichler also attend.

“Three heads are better than one,” he said.

The project became a reality after the town was awarded a $694,000 Town Road Improvement grant last spring.

That covers about 70% of the project’s cost. The town will pay about $300,000.

The town’s portion of the road to be paved is about one mile long, from Highway LL to the railroad tracks.

Work includes clear cutting trees, mowing and grading ditches, doing road base work and putting in new culverts. The 24-foot wide road will be paved with asphalt and have three-foot gravel shoulders.

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 the expansion of those already there.

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 with land acquisition for a retention pond slowed progress, and redoing Main Street moved ahead of paving Silver Beach. The job has since been deemed too expensive with the village inching too close to its debt limit to take on without significant help from a grant.

The town’s project only paves the town portion. The village’s grant application was not approved and it won’t be paving its part.

The town is scheduled to open bids at its 6 p.m. meeting on Monday, April 3 and hold a special meeting at 6 p.m. Monday, April 10, to award the bid.

“It’s a little complex project. The night when I open them they’ll be kind of a general feeling of maybe who it is but I’ll have to sit down and run numbers and look at qualities,” Janeshek said.

Town electors last fall shifted $20,000 that was to go toward a Belgium Fire Department multipurpose vehicle into the roads budget to help pay for the project.