The City of Kenai will spend more than $160,000 to assess the condition of its streets and street lights. That’s after Kenai City Council members last week approved two contracts for the work. Both contracts include creating an inventory of existing infrastructure and development of a plan for maintenance and rehabilitation.
The first contract is for $85,780 to study street conditions. Of that, most of the money will be spent on asphalt roads. The rest will go to gravel roads. Kenai Publics Work Director Lee Frey estimates the road study will take about four months and says the company hopes to start work soon.
“They're expecting to be on the ground by the end of the month and make sure they do all the visual inspections before the snow flies this year,” he told council members.
The second contract council members approved is for $79,045 to assess street lights. Frey says the scope of that contract prioritizes information gathering.
“The consultant is basically going to be starting out by doing an entire inventory, going to every street light, tracking down what we have on off, you know what?” he said. “What this is, what the light is, what the pole is. They're going to be collecting a lot of data that we just do not have physically written down available at our hands.”
Council member Alex Douthit says he’s happy to see the city moving forward with the two initiatives. He says better knowledge of the city’s network of streetlights will be especially beneficial heading into winter.
“These are always a hot topic item, especially coming up here in about a month, we'll start getting a bunch of people yelling and screaming once the sun leaves us,” he said. “So it's great to say that we're working forward with a long term plan, and this will help be able to put our money in the right spots and see where we need to spend it. With both these assessments.”
Kenai City Council meetings are available to stream on the city’s YouTube channel.
