The Rapid City Post: State D.O.T. holds Lazelle Street construction open house
The State Department of Transportation held a public meeting Thursday night to update residents about the major project that will widen and rebuild Lazelle Street.
D.O.T. Regional Engineer Mike Carlson says Lazelle Street, also referred to as State Highway 34, is seeing increased traffic amounts and is in desperate need of improvements. The project will address aging pavement and infrastructure, outdated pedestrian accessibility, traffic signal updates and a widening of the highway.
That widening of the highway is what brought out many residents and business owners who live along Lazelle Street, where the D.O.T. will more than likely, have to use their right of way acquisition process.
“It’s a big impact to them. It’s a small impact to us, of course, because because we’re doing so many of them,” Carlson says.
“There’s, what, 60 to 80 of them. So, every one’s a small, but it’s huge for them and we understand it completely. We want to give them time to think about what their needs are. Um you know, we’ve done this, I’ve done this for 42 years, and so I understand the impacts that we we do on a construction project when we take property from them, even temporarily take property from them. They can’t use it for a year or two while we’re building stuff. It takes time, so we want to make sure that they understand what what the impacts are, they have a good understanding of what we’re going to do, and what their rights and responsibilities are, and what our what we need to do for them.”
The D.O.T. wants to make the driving lanes and the middle turning lanes through Sturgis each 11-feet wide. Currently, the driving lanes are 9-feet each with the middle turning lane at 12-feet. Sidewalks would grow from their current 5-feet wide to 6-feet wide. To do that, the project would encroach onto private property, although Carlson says they would work around buildings that were built right up to the current sidewalks. Such a building is the Key City Lanes Bowling Alley. In that situation, engineers would take more from the north side of the road.
Carlson the plan is to begin construction in 2030 with right-of-way acquisition beginning in 2029. Because of the motorcycle rally, he says the project would need to be done in phases.
“Yeah, it is time. It’s probably even well past time, but it needs to be done. Sooner rather than later, as always. But this fits our time frame really well. So, our goal is try to get this done. And as we work through this, we’ll work through the construction phasing, as well. We’ll try to get it done as soon as possible, but the problem is the Rally, which is very economically beneficial to Sturgis, but it takes a huge portion of our construction time out of production that we can’t do anything with. So, that’s why it takes two years to build those projects.”
As of now, the cost of the project is an estimated $26.99 million. The D.O.T. says it is dependent on federal funding.