Residents traveling along North Hills Street will need to find alternate routes as the City of Meridian plans to begin paving the thoroughfare beginning Monday, Nov. 6.
In a news release, Director of Engineering and Technical Services Mike Van Zandt said the project will be split into several sections, which will be completed over a period of four or five weeks.
Paving will begin from Highway 19 to Bounds Road, then Bounds Road to State Boulevard. Section three will be State Boulevard to King Road, and section four will be King Road to 35th Avenue. From there, crews will work from 35th Avenue to Poplar Springs Drive and Poplar Springs Drive to 10th Avenue. The final section will be 10th Avenue to Highway 39.
“Only residents who live within the section under construction will be allowed entry/exit,” Van Zandt said.
Detour routes will be marked to help motorists navigate around each closed section.
The paving work is one of two ongoing projects along North Hills Street, which sees more than 18,000 vehicles per day. Meridian was allocated $3.4 million by the state legislature earlier this year to pay for the paving work.
The City Council approved a $120,000 contract with Engineering Plus earlier this month to provide construction engineering and inspection services throughout the paving project. The engineering firm will perform duties such as testing asphalt composition, making sure new pavement is being compacted and handling issues that may pop up during the paving process.
The $120,000 is a not-to-exceed amount, and the actual costs are expected to be significantly lower.
The paving work itself will be done by Falcon Contracting, which is based in Columbus. The city has a term bid with Falcon for paving work and has used them on multiple projects. Currently, the company is working to resurface streets within the medical district.
Falcon is also set to begin paving work in Marion after it was awarded a $194,635 contract earlier this month to resurface parts of Clinton Street as well as Koosa and Panola drives. That work is set to begin within the next few weeks.
Meridian has also been awarded an additional $3.5 million Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to cover planning and design of a greater improvement project along the North Hills corridor.
Public Works Director David Hodge has previously explained that sections of North Hills Street simply were not designed to handle the volume of traffic the road sees on a day-to-day basis. Part of the design project will be examining those areas and developing plans to make the road as safe to travel as possible.
The RAISE grant project will extend beyond the paving work, covering North Hills Street from Highway 19 to the city limits near Lamar School. The plan will call for additional traffic signals, reconfiguring intersections, adding turn lanes and more.
Once the design is complete, city officials plan to seek additional grants and outside funding opportunities to cover the construction. Project estimates put the cost of the work at around $28 million.