Several previous PROPEL projects have been completed or are under construction.
• Widening Gore Boulevard to five lanes between 67th and 82nd streets in west Lawton is underway. That one-mile section carried an average of 4,300 vehicles daily in 2020, research showed.
A $13,782,348 contract on that job was awarded to Duit Construction Co. The Oklahoma Department of Transportation will pay 62.5% of the cost and the City of Lawton will contribute the other 37.5%, according to City Engineer Joe Painter. Construction started May 9 and is expected to be finished by February 2025, he said.
In preparation for the work, a 12-inch-diameter water line and 8-inch and 12-inch sanitary sewer lines along Gore Boulevard were replaced at a total construction cost of $2.2 million.
• A project from the 2016 CIP sales tax was “overlay and reconstruction of residential streets.”
Mayor Booker’s “40 Wins for the Citizens” street milling and asphalt overlay program began in October 2023 and is proceeding toward completion by Thanksgiving Day 2024.
Councilman George Gill reported that the first 10 streets were finished on Feb. 27 – 19 days ahead of schedule. The cost of repaving those streets was approximately $1.7 million, Councilman Kelly Harris said.
Fifteen more streets were soon identified, and several of those are under construction. Another 15 streets subsequently were added to the list, and five more were added just recently, raising the total to 45, Gill told Southwest Ledger.
Resurfacing with asphalt will extend the life of those streets for perhaps five to ten years, according to Chris Serrano, project manager with EST civil engineering firm.
• A $34.4 million, 106,778 square-foot Public Safety building to house the police station, a municipal jail that can accommodate 126 inmates, the fire department, and municipal court, opened three years ago. The 57-year-old former police station was torn down in May last year.
• Two more cells will be excavated at Lawton’s sanitary landfill under a $3.84 million contract the City Council awarded last month to 4X Construction Group of Mansfield, Texas. Painter said construction should be completed within 260 calendar days.
The City of Lawton owns 760 acres for solid waste disposal, Caitlin Gatlin, the city’s communications manager, told the Ledger last November. The landfill currently occupies 243 of those acres and the remainder are for expansion, she said.
The new cells 6 and 7 will be individual waste-holding units inside the overall landfill, and each cell will encompass approximately 9.6 acres, Gatlin said.