PRAT revenue sought for use in additional street repairs

BY KEVIN BONESKE

REPORTER/PHOTOGRAPHER

Now that road work on Rhinelander’s downtown Streetscape project has wrapped up, other streets in the city are being looked at for repairs.

The city’s Public Works Committee voted Thursday to seek engineering services from Town and Country Engineering, Inc., related to resurfacing several city streets this year when the scope of the work could include spot curb and gutter repair, spot sidewalk repair and the milling and overlay of four sections of Stevens Street and a section of Boyce Drive.

The committee’s motion, which calls for the engineering costs not to exceed $15,900, is also contingent upon those services being able to be paid for with Premier Resort Area Tax (PRAT) revenue, which the city began to collect this year from a half-percent sales tax charged by “tourism-related retailers” to help pay for infrastructure expenses such as fixing roads.

In the city’s 2017 budget, an estimated $400,000 has been projected in annual PRAT revenue, which previously wasn’t available to spend on road work before the tax took effect.

The scope of the engineering services was outlined in a memo Mark Barden of Town and Country provided to city public works director Tim Kingman. Those services could include the following tasks:

• Field inspection of streets to be resurfaced to identify curb and gutter and sidewalk replacement, taking measurements and determining limits of construction.
• Design and plan production which includes evaluating alternate methods of repair and producing plans for bidding purposes which include pavement marking.
• Providing specifications and bidding documents to include alternate bid items for curb and gutter and sidewalk repair and resurfacing of the North Anderson Street parking lot. This will also include involvement in the bidding process and contract award.
• Construction administration which includes review of construction time schedules, project management, construction coordination, change order requests, pay requests and periodic site visits.

Kingman said a bidding document could be put together that would itemize the work so that portions of the repairs could be completed by either city workers or a contractor.

“For instance, if we wanted a contractor just do the road surface, and we do the curb, we’d pull that curb off of their plate,” Kingman said.

Barden said the estimated total project construction costs for the street improvements, to include the North Anderson Street parking lot resurfacing, would be approximately $420,000.