State says I-30 project likely to continue into early 2025

HOT SPRINGS — Work on the Interstate 30 corridor project from U.S. 70 to Benton that has been underway since 2019 is expected to continue well into 2025, according to the director of the Arkansas Department of Transportation.

Department Director Lorie Tudor told elected officials and business leaders Thursday at the Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort Event Center that the project, which was originally projected to be completed by Nov. 16, 2022, was extended by 155 days due to “unforeseen site conditions” for a completion date of April 20, 2023.

Since Johnson Brothers Corporation, which has the contract for the widening project, did not complete the work in the extended 1,445-day contract, no payments have been made to the company since April 30, 2023, for a total of $21,459,000 in withheld payments due to overtime.

“That is because when they went into overtime, we started charging them $77,000 a day in road user costs because they’re outside their contract limit, their number of days,” Tudor said.

“And so they’re up for $77,000 a day, and their work that they performed has not exceeded that $77,000 a day. Today, right now, they have performed $21 million worth of work that we have not paid because of that penalty.”

Tudor said the withholding of funds “is supposedly a deterrent” for the company to complete the work as scheduled.

“It’s mind-boggling that a company can get this far into a project — they have been progressing the work, but they have not been getting paid,” she said. “Now this can all change when they go to claims, and they’re claiming additional time. And they can get that money back if claims deems it that they get awarded those days.”

The winter weather that hit the state starting on Jan. 14 exacerbated the problem and brought it further into the public eye after the westbound lanes of I-30 began to fail and large potholes formed along the 6-mile stretch of highway.

“The bottom line is: those westbound lanes, that pavement reached the end of its useful life a couple of years ago, and we shouldn’t be on that pavement right now,” Tudor said. “If that contract had been executed or progressed the way it should have been, we wouldn’t be here today. Now that pavement is old, and it’s at the end of its useful life.”

Tudor noted that when water that has seeped into cracks in a road freezes, “it creates a bubble” when it thaws.

“And when a truck — and you know how many trucks are on that — and regular cars hit it, it knocks out the pavement, and we’ve had some huge potholes out there,” she said. “And we had areas where the pavement was actually failing.”

A document was provided to attendees at the meeting giving a summary of events from Jan. 12 through Jan. 31. The document states that while no “major pavement failure” developed in the 6-mile stretch of the highway until Jan. 23, workers started applying “Quality Pavement Repair” to potholes that had been reported on Jan. 20.

“QPR is a high-performance pavement repair material that works in both cold and wet applications,” the document said. “No tack coat or mixing is required and [it] is available by the bag and in bulk. Once the QPR is placed into the pothole, it can be placed under traffic after compacting. In some instances, QPR has been shown to perform better than standard cold mix asphalt in wet and cold conditions due to a higher grade of liquid oil.”

On Jan. 20 and 21, Johnson Brothers applied 51 50-pound bags of QPR to potholes in the project area. The first severe potholes were reported around midnight on Jan. 23, and over 500 bags of QPR were used on potholes through Jan. 24.

The document said Johnson Brothers told Transportation Department officials it “anticipates having all eastbound traffic shifted onto the new concrete pavement by the middle of February.”

The department has contracted with Cranford Construction, which is part of McGeorge Contracting, to maintain the westbound lanes “and [keep] them in passable condition until we can get traffic over on new pavement, which we hope will be by the end of the month, the first of March,” Tudor said.

Tudor noted that the department is focused on completing the work on the project.

“We are committed to getting this done, and doing it to the best of our ability and for the benefit of everyone that drives through it,” she said. “And although taxpayers — we worry about being good stewards of the taxpayer money.

“At this point, we told them on Monday, when they were saying ‘Well, who’s going to pay for Cranford,’ I said, ‘I don’t care who pays for it. We’re going to do this because it has to get done. There reaches a point where you can’t nickel and dime things. You’ve just got to get in there and get it done.’ And they all agreed,” she said.

“So at the end, when we’re in claims, we’ll try to get that money back for the taxpayers because they should have been maintaining those lanes. But let me tell you right now, just know that I’m committed to keeping those lanes open, whatever we need to do.”

During a question-and-answer session, Oaklawn President Louis Cella suggested that additional oversight for the Transportation Department might be beneficial to the process.

“I challenge our local delegation that when they hear this, perhaps more oversight of your department is needed because what we’re seeing is — by even today’s discussion — your department lacks many, many of the qualifications required to vet these contracts,” he said.

“And when you hear today her say that in January ‘25 is optimistic, in the hospitality community, that’s just hopeless … because people aren’t coming. They’re scared,” Cella said.

“We have a club membership, people that have canceled on us because they said they don’t want to drive because they don’t know if it’ll be one hour, three hours or like last week, six hours to get here then have to turn around. … So my question is as a solution perhaps, why not take down the barricades, put some pavement over it, call [it] a day, and let the legal issues work themselves out. And when you do, go back and finish the project? I don’t know if that’s a viable solution or not.”

Tudor responded that she would have to take the idea “back to the team” to see if it is a viable option.