Roadwork update, Celina Record

Celina preps for several road repair, construction projects Lisa Ferguson, lferguson@starlocalmedia.com Apr 28, 2016 It’s a good thing orange is already the official color of Celina. That is because in coming weeks, months and years, drivers throughout the city and in neighboring areas will see a lot more of it in the form of traffic cones dotting local streets and highways as numerous roadwork projects get underway. “That’s just part of the cycle” of growth, explained Gabe Johnson, director of engineering and public works for the city. “Frisco went through it; we’re gonna have to go through it.” A few projects are about to commence or are already underway, including one at the entrance of the Willock Hills subdivision at Farm-to-Market 455 and Maryland Drive. A pair of brick walls that were built outside the subdivision when it was established a couple decades ago have been torn down. The street beneath the walls is scheduled to be torn out and repaved to repair “some pretty significant concrete failures with that whole entry,” Johnson said. Also on the property, joints on storm drain pipes have separated and will be corrected. The street above those pipes will be repaved. Johnson said there are several road-related issues in Willock Hills, namely spalling and cracking of the concrete. “The streets were poorly constructed, which is why they haven’t done well over time. They’ve got a lot of cracking and failures” that the city wants to eventually repair or replace, he said. “There’s just a lot of other needs in downtown, so it’s just one thing we’re trying to get wrapped up.” The Willock Hills project is expected to be completed within 60 days, Johnson said, at a cost of $220,000. The city is also set to soon begin a project it has dubbed the “2015 Overlays,” which will repair roads in the North Preston Lakes Estates, Preston Hills and High Pointe subdivisions. The subdivisions were annexed into the city in recent years from its extraterritorial jurisdiction. Some of the streets located within them have experienced base or subgrade failures that have resulted in surfaces that are fractured, cracked and uneven. The road conditions in parts of North Preston Lakes Estates are so poor that they pose safety concerns, Johnson said, and similar conditions also exist in North Preston Hills. Streets in both neighborhoods will receive a new layer of asphalt as part of the project. Asphalt was also applied earlier this week to a portion of County Road 128 in front of High Point Estates, where the concrete has experienced some cracking and other signs of failure. “It’s a pretty short stretch, just to get it cleaned up,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t as severe as North Preston Lakes or Preston Hills.” The entire overlay project will cost $864,000 and take about three months to complete. Look for other road work projects to get underway throughout the city, many of them driven by residential real-estate developers as they break ground on long-planned housing tracts. “You will see movement as … you have adjacent roads to the subdivisions they’ll be building” begin to be constructed and existing roads expanded, Johnson said. Fast forward about two years: That is when Johnson said a slate of large-scale road-construction projects in and around Celina could begin. “There’s going to be a lot of roadwork going on, a lot of major infrastructure going in,” he said, pointing to 2019 as “kind of the culminating year for a lot of different projects.” Those projects include the Collin County Outer Loop, which will eventually run through Celina. Frontage road construction for the Outer Loop could begin in about two years. Collin Countyis also engineering and designing frontage roads for the Dallas North Tollway, from U.S. Highway 380 in Prosper to FM 428 in Celina, which it hopes to have completed by late 2018 or early 2019. Once the frontage roads are complete, Johnson said it may be an additional eight or nine years before the main tollway lanes would be built through Celina. Meanwhile, Denton County is planning to build a southbound frontage road stretching from the Grayson County line to FM 428. “So by 2019, we may have a frontage road from Grayson County all the way down to 428, and two frontage roads from 428 to 380, and then we may have the connection from Preston (Road) to the DNT along the Outer Loop frontage road,” he explained. The expansion of a two-mile stretch of North Preston Road, from Celina High School to the Grayson County line, to four lanes may also begin in 2018. Johnson said the Texas Department of Transportation is working to secure funds for that project. Since development in the area is minimal, he said the project may prove to be less stressful for drivers than during the expansion of Preston Road’s southern portion, which wrapped up last year. Also being designed is Celina Parkway, a planned six-lane divided thoroughfare that will traverse the former proposed alignment of the Dallas North Tollway from FM 428 to the Grayson County line. Johnson said the parkway project may break ground in 2018 or 2019.