Pain, then progress: Oklahoma 97 widening will test Sandites’ patience
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“We’re gonna have some pain.”
Residents might be alarmed by how often City Manager Mike Carter uses the word “pain” when discussing the upcoming massive road project planned for the Oklahoma 97 corridor, the busiest street in Sand Springs.
But Carter hopes residents will focus on a different word that starts with the same letter — progress.
“I kind of tell people euphemistically that 2022 was the year of planning and engineering and 2023 will be the year of construction,” Carter told the Sand Springs Leader recently.
And he hopes that when it’s all said and done, residents will be so happy with the progress that they won’t dwell on the pain.
“We’re excited about this,” he said. “It’s going to mean exciting things for our citizens.”
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The primary project that everything else will tie into is a $15 million design of the Oklahoma Department of Transportation to widen and rehabilitate Oklahoma 97 from where it intersects with Second Street north of U.S. 412 running south under the highway to where it intersects with the newly opened stretch of Main Street just north of the Arkansas River.
As part of the expansion, the state also will replace all of the traffic lights in the corridor, and the city is paying extra for the lights to be connected by fiber optic cable, which will allow more intelligent, real-time management of traffic flow and congestion.
ODOT put the project out for bids in the fall, but it garnered no interest.
Carter said the project was up against two others that were much larger and that since only a few companies are capable of such extensive work, the other projects got the bids.
ODOT pulled the project back and will put it out for bids again next month, when the climate is expected to be more favorable.
Construction should start late this spring or in the early summer, with the work taking 18 to 24 months.
That’s where the pain will come in.
But if there’s going to be pain, why not do all of the painful things at the same time and get it over with?
That’s the city’s thinking. Well, that and the fact that by coordinating some of its own projects to take place in tandem with the state work, the city can perhaps reap some cost-savings that can be reallocated to other needs.
As most local motorists know, a new extension of Main Street recently joined up with Oklahoma 97 on the east side of the highway just north of the Arkansas River Bridge. The timing was no accident.
“We intentionally prioritized that project and pushed it to get it open before the Highway 97 project,” Carter said. “We’re going to have growing pains. It’s going to be tough to get through there. We needed that as a way for people to be able to get around.”
What’s next for that intersection will be a dedicated right-turn lane from the highway’s northbound lanes onto Main Street.
“This project has been on the books for about 15 years,” Carter said. “When it was first envisioned, ODOT said they didn’t think a turn lane was the right idea at the time,” and the project was not approved.
The current ODOT administration, which Carter said “has been wonderful to work with,” agreed that the turn lane was needed and said that if the city would pay for it, the agency would allow it.
Although the future turn lane is paved at present, it’s not yet suitable for regular traffic.
“We will construct a new turn lane there, and that will help people not have to go down and make a dramatic 90-degree turn like they do now,” Carter said.
He said the city moved money around to expedite construction, adding that the project should be going to bid very soon, with the beginning of construction hoped for by summer.
Carter also dispelled one rumor about the project — that it has anything to do with a recent snafu when a train was stopped for hours on the tracks that cross Oklahoma 97 at that location.
“This is not in relation to the train issue,” he said. “It takes awhile to get stuff like this engineered. We’ve been looking at this and talking about it for six to eight months.
On the opposite side of Oklahoma 97, the city has just recently received permission from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build a road over the levee at the south end of Case Community Park that will exit onto the highway south of Dutch Bros.
The new road will enhance traffic flow into and out of the park during large events such as the Fourth of July fireworks and Boo at Case Park, but a side benefit is that it will provide a bypass to Oklahoma 97 when necessary.
Carter said park patrons should not worry about the road becoming an extension of the highway.
“We’re going to put speed humps. We’re going to do things to mitigate people’s speed,” he said last week during his State of the City speech. “It’s not meant to be an expressway through the park.”
Although the levee road, a 2017 general-obligation bond project, was held up for a time by the Army Corps of Engineers, Carter said the corps and Tulsa County District 12 Levee Commissioner Todd Kilpatrick have been generally helpful and supportive of the plan.
The project will be put out for bids soon, with construction expected to start sometime around the middle of the year, he said.
Carter is excited about all of the road work, but he points out that there’s even more to be positive about.
Although ODOT will restripe Oklahoma 97, other city roads will get a new coat of paint, too.
“One of the things we did when I came into office was doubled the budget for lane markings from $50,000 to $100,000,” he said, adding that another striping package will be completed this year.
Also, as part of the work along Oklahoma 97, two 96-inch box culverts will be buried alongside the highway next to Dutch Bros and Chick-fil-A to convey stormwater from Morrow Road by Cox Supersaver and Walmart — an area where flooding has been a chronic problem — to the river.
That, in turn, will allow the city to reclaim land in the Sheffield Crossing development that is being used as a detention pond and use it instead for restaurant or retail development.
Road work and infrastructure improvements might not sound thrilling to many people, but Carter hopes residents will look past the pain and the tedium to the possibilities, such as the economic development opportunities the projects might facilitate.
“Highway 97 is the key to attracting a bunch of these things to our city,” he said.
Compiled by Sand Springs Leader’s Sharon Bishop-Baldwin.
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