The entry road that connects Eden Prairie City Center to Mitchell Road was closed today to allow for a substantial maintenance project. If you need to access our building, you will need to use the Scenic Heights Road entrance. The asphalt will be milled off of the existing road bed and removed. Any bad sections of gutter or curb will be replaced. We’ll fix any drainage problems while we’re at it. Then we’ll put a shiny new coat (more like 2 or 3 coats) of asphalt on the road. Finally, it will need to sit for a week without traffic in order to firm up to be ready for traffic.
The City is employing a private construction contractor to accomplish this project. The same contractor just completed a complete rehabilitation of the City employee parking lot that surrounds City Center. They did a nice job with that project too.
There’s a lot of planning that goes into something that looks as simple as putting new asphalt down in a parking lot. We had to plan for alternate parking for employees. During the construction City employees parked on the far north end of the west parking lot, which is typically full of School District employees – except in the summertime. We also had to make alternate plans for deliveries and for citizen parking. We had to make sure that C.H. Robinson and the Eden Prairie School District, which both have major operations in City Center, were apprised of the project time line every day. Oh ya, and we also needed to make sure the construction contractor did everything we contracted with him to do.
For all the little things that could have gone wrong, we actually had a relatively pain-free project. There was a lot of inconvenience caused for a lot of people, but they absorbed it patiently and were pretty good sports about the whole thing. Paul Sticha, our Facilities Manager, managed this project. It’s not over yet, so I hope that I haven’t jinxed him. But so far, so good.
