End in sight for New Braunfels’ 3-year road project

NEW BRAUNFELS Road construction contractors who have been a fixture on Walnut Avenue here for more than three years are due to leave by January but don't think the city's largest-ever capital improvement project will finally be done.

Texas Sterling Construction, which originally was slated to complete its part the $28.5 million job last June, will return when the weather warms to finish paving the newly-widened 1.5-mile stretch of the major traffic artery reaching north from Interstate 35.

The project's end can't come soon enough for motorists weary of delays and for nearby merchants who say its maze of detours and barricades drove off customers.

The barricades will be gone and all four lanes of the road should open to traffic Saturday, although it will be a bumpy ride until the final paving is done, said Octavio Garza, project supervisor for the city. Installing that last layer of asphalt, if done all at once, should take two weeks, he said.

Everybody is really frustrated with it taking forever, it seems like, to complete the project; the city, the contractor and the citizens, Garza said last week.

Texas Sterling has been docked $1,600 a day by the city in liquidated damages on its $15.5 million road construction contract since missing its initial deadline for substantial completion on April 3, Garza said. Company officials declined comment.

The hassles and hardhats have become an everyday reality in the dust-laden construction zone since the barricades first went up in September 2010.

It's been here so long that people don't even talk about it any more, said Larry Wenzel of Creative Eyewear, which lost an entrance driveway as part of the road's redesign.

Debbie Clark, owner of The Loft Salon next door, has taken to stalking Texas Sterling crews with her camera if she sees something fishy, like the day she says five workers were pushing each other up and down a closed road section in a rolling office chair.

I'll be so glad when we actually have the road open, said Clark, whose business opened six months before the crews arrived. Our clients will know where to turn in and we won't have all the dust.

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End in sight for New Braunfels' 3-year road project