A series of buckled bricks in Concord’s downtown will cost an estimated $40,000 to $45,000 to fix, city officials said.
The city’s engineering staff will be out at 5 a.m. Friday – before the morning traffic picks up – to check on the condition of four of the downtown’s heavily-trafficked crosswalks before putting out bids to get them fixed.
Those crosswalks, located where N. Main Street meets Pleasant, Warren and Depot Streets, as well as the crosswalk across from the Capital Plaza building, all require work after some of the bricks were displaced or damaged, said city engineer David Cedarholm.
All of the downtown’s 23 crosswalks were constructed in the same way: a concrete slab topped with an inch of compacted sand and then brick. The problem with the Warren and Depot Streets crosswalks, as well as the Capital Plaza crosswalk, is drainage and wear, Cedarholm said.
“Main Street is quite flat,” he said. “And that creates a puddle in those areas that, combined with heavy traffic, stresses out the brick.”
As water washes away the compacted sand, the bricks can become loose and shift.
The Pleasant Street crosswalk is burdened by left-turning traffic coming off Pleasant onto N. Main St.
The permanent fix, Cedarholm said, will be a “heavy-duty paver design,” which layers an inch of an asphalt mix on top of the existing concrete slab, followed by the bricks. The city will also fix the grading on three of the crosswalks, which Cedarholm said will solve the drainage problem.
Money to fix the crosswalks will come from the Main Street Complete Streets Construction project, which has about $160,000 remaining, Cedarholm said. The project had about $1.1 million from its $14.2 million budget left over when the project was formally declared finished in November 2016.
The heavy-duty design was one of the original crosswalks construction solutions considered when the city was putting out bids for the downtown renovation back in 2013, Cedarholm said.
However, the heavy-duty design was much more expensive than the sand and concrete solution – about $6,000 to $8,000 more per sidewalk, Cedarholm said.
It’s also much more difficult to fix if something goes wrong with the crosswalk. Whereas the underbellies of the afflicted crosswalks are relatively easy to get to, whereas works will have to “jackhammer out the bricks” if the heavy-duty design fails.
But Cedarholm said that is unlikely to happen once the crosswalks are fixed. He said he is confident the other crosswalks will not sustain similar wear and tear.
“At the end of the day, we have 23 crosswalks and only three are really problematic,” he said.
The crosswalks on N. Main Street were completed in 2015, a year before the south side of Main Street was finished.
That means the two-year warranty the city had with contractor Severino Trucking has expired, putting the city on the hook for repairs. Cedarholm said Severino has been back to the city to do “a number of repairs” to the downtown crosswalks during that time.
“We’re at a point now where this is maintenance,” he said.
It will take a little over a month for the crosswalks to be fixed; Cedarholm said that bids have not gone out yet and work probably won’t start until July.
In the meantime, the affected spots will be patched with asphalt.
The timeline caused a little dismay when it was announced to Concord’s city councilors last week during a regular hearing.
“So I’ve got about another month and a half to trip over my own feet on the crosswalks?” Mayor Jim Bouley quipped.
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)