Towns will cooperate on streets grant

All four local municipalities are cooperatively putting in for a Department of Transportation TIB grant this week.

If the grant applications are successful, it will enable the four cities and towns to get a better bid on the work, Elmer City Public Works Director “Jimmer” Tillman said Tuesday.

The grant would be for chip sealing and crack sealing of selected streets within the four municipalities.

Tillman, who sparked the idea, said that it costs a lot of money for contractors to come and set up, especially for smaller jobs. “If they had jobs in all four cities and towns — Electric City, Grand Coulee, Coulee Dam and Elmer City — they would save a lot of setup fees and we could get a better overall bid,” Tillman said.

Elmer City had a recent TIB (Transportation Improvement Board) grant on its sidewalk and crosswalk project and had to get an extra $50,000 because bids came in too high. That project of putting in sidewalks and a lighted crosswalk across highway 155 was initiated so people could get to the post office safely and was just recently completed with a grant of $290,000.

Elmer City had been successful in acquiring another TIB grant of $400,000 a few years ago to rebuild Third Street and add sidewalks and curbs for better access from downtown to the Elmer City Access Road.

Tillman had been to a meeting recently where he learned that the DOT grant partners would look favorably on cooperative projects where improvements could be made at the same time to save money.

He returned and started calling his public works counterparts in the other towns to see if all of them would cooperate. They did.

The grant applications are due this week and funding for selected projects would come in 2017, Tillman said.