A short stretch of Lutz Road heading south from Three Rivers may be up for reconstruction soon. Garrett Myland, Assistant Manager and Engineer for the St. Joseph County Road Commission (SJCRC), said in a report Wednesday he is pursuing a multi-year project to have Lutz Road rebuilt in its entirety from Highway M-86 all the way to U.S.-12. Working toward that larger goal, Myland is seeking a handful of grants to help rebuild the road’s first two miles from M-86 south to Fairchild Road in 2021.

The proposed work would eventually see Lutz Road reconfigured to more closely resemble the condition and form of Shimmel Road running south from Centreville. Upgraded features would include greater overall width as well as wider, asphalt-paved shoulders, guardrails, and more earthwork beyond the road’s edges. Myland said Lutz and Shimmel see similar vehicle counts, but Lutz Road has more commercial traffic, making it “one of the most important roads in the county.”

Starting with the two-mile stretch makes the larger project more feasible, Myland said, partly by spreading costs over several years. It also gets the road’s most topographically difficult section out of the way first.

To make the work happen, Myland has applied or will apply for several grants. Work on the two-mile stretch will consist of one larger job separated into four individual projects, numbered one through four. This separation would enable different grants to each contribute toward the overall end result but within the confines of what the separate guidelines for each grant will permit them to fund. The total cost for the two-mile reconstruction will be around $930,000, Myland said.

A safety grant will cover Project One, which would include tree removal, embankment hill excavation, reconstructing or “trenching out” shoulders, and slope restoration north of the river. Project One’s cost will be about $260,000.

A small urban grant will cover Project Two, which falls within a specific section inside the bounds of an urban jurisdiction associated with Three Rivers. That jurisdiction ends at the Prairie River bridge near the Sauganash Golf Club, and the grant would cover repaving of the road surface and renewal of joints in that section. Project Two will cost roughly $140,000, Myland said.

With a price tag of around $375,000, Project Three includes paving of shoulders that are currently gravel as well as the existing road surface, and addition of guardrails, pavement markings, and traffic control measures north of the Prairie River Bridge. The last project, Project Four, would cost about $150,000, and would include similar work like surface milling, asphalt, gravel, shoulder work, and pavement markings south of the Prairie River bridge.

The safety and small urban grants have been applied for, and the safety grant has been awarded, Myland said. If other parts of the funding package come through to provide the necessary funds to match grants against one another and complete the work, the safety grant award will yield a total of $364,500. Myland said he is applying for $300,000 from the source of the small urban grant in order to cover Project Two and some of the potential matching costs for Project Three.

The remaining $265,500 could be covered by SJCRC’s general fund balance or other local sources. Myland said the alternative would be an overlay of about $300,000. The difference, Myland said, means a potential savings for SJCRC of $35,000 and the benefit of “drastically improving the road.” Myland is also applying for a grant through the Transportation Economic Development Fund (TED-F), which would supply funds for Project Three. He expects to hear results in January.

If the TED-F fund were not successful, Myland said SJCRC staff leadership would still like to pursue the project. However, Myland is optimistic about the TED-F application. He said, “we’re potentially talking about having $630,00 out of $930,000 already covered, so I’m hoping that less than a third will be a high sell for them.”

Dividing the work into four projects under one job enables Myland to apply for each grant according to its own terms while still bidding the job out to a single contractor. He said the arrangement “will be a paperwork nightmare, but if it gets us over $600,000, the paperwork is worth doing.”

Also in Road Commission business:

• SJCRC Vice Chair Eric Shafer said the agency’s current cash on hand is $3.3 million, down from where it stood at the same time in 2020 at about $5 million. With expected receivables, Shafer said the balance should work out to be closer to $3.8 or $3.9 million. However, Shafer said, the decrease is a result of the fact that SJCRC did “exactly what our plan was, which was to spend down the cash balance and get roads fixed.”
• Planned spending for 2021 may be somewhat more conservative, but SJCRC Director John Lindsey is currently negotiating with townships to work out jointly funded project priorities for the year. Other influences on next year’s expenditures will include how contributions from the Michigan Transportation Fund work out, how much winter weather demands use of salt and other resources, and other factors.
• SJCRC board members voted Wednesday to rescind a lease approved two weeks ago for a small part of a SJRCR-owned parcel near Three Rivers to an adjacent farmer named Phil DuFour. SJCRC had been using the larger portion of the parcel to mind sand and gravel, and the extent of mining was greater than SJCRC staff and board previously believed. There is, in actuality, insufficient unmined land left for DuFour to have used under the lease.
• Myland said a hoped-for grant of $760,000 toward a proposed 2023 renewal of the Langley Covered Bridge has been approved by the Southwest Bridge Council, combining with other grants and appropriations and bringing the project’s available total to date significantly closer to the projected rehabilitation cost of roughly $2 million.
• A $760,000 grant from the Southwest Bridge Council of Michigan has been approved, Myland said, supplementing other grants and appropriations and moving total available funds significantly closer to the $2 million projected cost of rehabilitating the historic Langley Covered Bridge in 2023.
• A grant to cover between one and three highway crossing replacements on the Grand Elk Railroad in the county is still pending, Myland said. A Nottawa Road bridge is also still in the running for a statewide bridge replacement bundling project by the Michigan Department of Transportation.
• SJCRC board member John Bippus’s term expires on December 31, and on Tuesday, the St. Joseph County Commission voted not to renew him, instead appointing Jack Coleman to the seat. On Wednesday, SJCRC board members discussed pooling their own resources to honor Bippus’s service, as well as that of two other recent, former board members.

Dave Vago is a writer and columnist for Watershed Voice. A Philadelphia native with roots in Three Rivers, Vago is a planning consultant to history and community development organizations and is the former Executive Director of the Three Rivers DDA/Main Street program.