Goal of rehabbing 40 Lawton streets by Thanksgiving achievable

LAWTON – Contractors are well on the way to meeting the mayor’s goal of rehabilitating 40 streets by Thanksgiving. “I fully expect us to meet that deadline,” Councilman George Gill, chairman of the city’s Streets, Roads and Bridges Committee, said recently.

The first 10 streets to be milled and overlaid with fresh asphalt were completed Feb. 27 – 19 days ahead of schedule, at a cost of $1.5 million, Gill said.

A $5.1 million contract was awarded to T&G Construction of Lawton to mill and overlay 15 more streets, and that project is nearing completion, Gill told the City Council on June 25.

A $5.1 million contract on another 15 streets also was awarded to T&G, and that job is expected to start “pretty quickly,” Gill told Southwest Ledger.

In addition, the committee has identified five more streets to be rehabbed, Gill said, but the council has not yet authorized those roads for improvement.

“Not every street needs to be torn up and replaced,” Gill said. “We need to use cost-effective and life-extending measures to repair our roads and bridges.”

Chris Serrano, project manager with EST civil engineering firm, said resurfacing with asphalt will extend the life of the streets for perhaps five to ten years. “The subbase of these streets is still in good condition,” he said. “The integrity of the roads is good” but patching will be required at some locations,” he added.

The Streets, Roads and Bridges Committee selected “some of the worst streets in Lawton” for mill-and-overlay work, councilman and committee member Kelly Harris said. “We also looked at traffic counts,” which factored into the selection of the streets.

Lawton’s streets have suffered from decades of inattention. Priorities established by the municipal committee are based at least in part on a pavement assessment that was completed in 2022. The evaluation concluded that 37.7% of Lawton’s streets were rated “good” to “excellent,” while 62.3% of them were deemed to be in “fair” to “very poor” condition.

Mayor Stan Booker’s “10 Wins for the Citizens” program was launched last October, but quickly expanded to 40 streets throughout the city and was renamed “On Target, on Time.”

The City Council voted in May for a minimum 2% increase from the previous year’s allocated budget for the Streets & Traffic Control Division’s Repair and Maintenance account for street milland- overlay and panel replacement projects.

According to City Manager John Ratliff, “We will take from other areas to fund the increases.” Each year the “payor” will be a different city department, he said.

City officials have adopted this approach because, “We’re having to fix years of neglect and we don’t want this to happen again,” Ratliff said.

The city’s new budget more than doubled the amount earmarked for street “repair and maintenance”: from $4,499,500 in FY 202324 to $10 million in