East Central Iowa News

During their Jan. 23 meeting, the Marshalltown City Council discussed the future of their Center Street Viaduct project.

The City has been working on repairing the viaduct over Center street since 2020 when they hired Stanley Consultants to do a review and analysis of the aged viaduct. They have continued their working relationship with the business as they do small improvements and repairs to the project, since the full construction cannot begin until 2024 due to major supply delays. The City has approval from the UPRR to do the repairs, but their attempts to obtain materials and start construction in 2023 failed. The updated quotes for current material costs are approximately $2.9 million, which is almost $1 million over the City’s current budget for the project.

"So we do feel there is a funding source out there," Public Works director Heather Thomas said in the meeting. "The highway bridge program, we frequently call this the City Bridge Fund program. We have a 95% confidence that we will be awarded a maximum grant of $1.5 million. It is a federal and state program. So that is assuming they don't make any changes to that program, although this program has been a pretty stable program from history. We would go ahead and apply for those funds now. We would know in November or December of this year whether we received or was offered those fundings. Because this is federal fund, we would have to go through a DOT bid letting and wait for those federal funds to be available, which means we could not do a formal bid letting through the DOT until October or November of 2024. With the material lead times, that means construction would be delayed till 2025."

After presenting those details, Thomas discussed several options for moving forward, including proceeding with current projects of repairing finger joint and roller bearings, repainting some of the pedestrian areas, replacing deck drains, and working on both the north and south abutments. The second option would be the same set of projects without redoing the pedestrian railings, thus removing some of the funding shortfall. Option 3 would be the project without the railing work and north abutment work. All three options would be done in 2024. Another option would be to delay and apply for grant funding, although that would push the project even further into the future.

A representative from the consultants also spoke to the council. He advised that the only real concern in delaying the project further would be the aging finger joints that might need to be partially removed or temporarily covered while they wait so that they do not cause issues in the meantime. The council discussed and determined that they wanted to get more information about the costs of temporary fixes so that they could proceed with the fourth option of grant funding.

The council will vote on the project at their February meeting.