Downtown Carson Street Corridor ready for Nevada Day, ribbon cutting noon Friday

Nearly eight months after the Municipality of Carson City and Q&D Construction broke ground on the Downtown Carson Street Corridor Improvement Project on March 7, the ribbon is now ready to be cut on the $8 million dollar expenditure one day ahead of the Nevada Day Parade.

A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the project’s much-anticipated completion, which encompassed several blocks of Carson City’s downtown core between William and Fifth streets, is scheduled for noon on Friday, Oct. 28, in front of the state capitol building, said Carson City Public Works Engineering Manager Daniel Rotter.

That event will be followed by a street party hosted by the Downtown Business Association (DBA), celebrating the end of a process that has tested the mettle of downtown businesses, motorists, cyclists and pedestrians alike.

The DBA is partnering with Muscle Powered, the Carson City Visitors Bureau, the Brewery Arts Center and Food for Thought to put on a full day of activities Friday in the downtown area.

Visit the DBA web site here for a complete list of the day's scheduled activities.

Q&D Construction and the Municipality of Carson City will also man the lead float in Saturday’s parade along the new downtown Carson Street corridor, Rotter said.

Friday’s ribbon cutting will mark the culmination of a decade of work, Rotter said, that began with a master plan drafted 10 years ago.

“The Downtown Project has been years in the making, starting with the Envision Carson City Master Plan in 2006,” he said. “The much needed infrastructure project addressed many outdated utilities, replaced the failing asphalt, improved ADA access, added bike lanes and parking, added 100-plus street trees and other street scape features.”

Many of the underground sewer pipes in the construction area were determined to be more than a half-century old, Carson City Transportation Manager Patrick Pittenger told Carson Now in a January interview.

Updating substandard below-ground utilities was as much a key focus of the project, he said, as creating a more bicycle and pedestrian friendly streetscape.

Rotter referred to downtown Carson Street’s new look as conforming with a “road diet” design meant to make the street safer for everyone using it.

“The road diet concept is most notably known for reducing the number of auto-to-auto and auto-to-pedestrian conflicts, that is safer streets,” he said. “After numerous years of planning, budgeting and design, I’m glad to see this project come to close out stage and have our city and state enjoy the new pedestrian friendly downtown on Nevada Day.”

Although the project is being completed on time and within budget, Rotter said, corridor construction was not without its hiccups and contingencies that made Carson Street its own unique adventure for engineers and crews alike.

Many of these — like old oil tanks found below Third Street, underneath what is now the Bob McFadden Plaza — were discovered once crews began to dig up the old utility network.

“The oil tanks at Third Street were one of the many underground surprises,” Rotter said. “Every utility type — water, sewer, storm water, communications — had its own challenges.”

Crews working on McFadden Plaza also found multiple sewer laterals stacked together and coming from under buildings to the north to serve the old Mercury Cleaners, Rotter said.

A culvert collapsed beneath the paver at Telegraph and Carson streets, he said, while at the Carson and Spear intersection crews were prepared to connect eight-inch water line before they discovered that existing pipes were only two inches in diameter.

“Luckily it was in the middle of the paver crosswalk, so it didn't mess up any of the new paving when we dug it up,” Rotter said of the culvert collapse. “What we found is it wasn't acting as a culvert at all, but a conduit for old communication lines.”

Despite surprises and setbacks, though, the project has been able to keep pace with its original completion plan, affording the city, its residents and downtown businesses a collective sigh of relief as Nevada Day approaches.

The transition of Carson Street has been relatively smooth, in spite of unforeseen problems that have arisen over the spring and summer months.

Assuaging concerns that reducing Carson Street to two lanes would cause greater traffic bottle-neck, Pittenger told Carson Now in January that traffic congestion has already been reduced by the Interstate 580 bypass currently open and completed to Fairview Drive.

“Once there were 40,000 vehicles a day on Carson Street,” he noted. “This is now down to 17,000 vehicles per day.”

Pittenger said he expects the traffic load to lighten even more once the final phase of the freeway bypass — from Fairview Drive paralleling South Edmunds Drive to the junction of Highway 50 West and Highway 395 South — is completed next year.

When that happens, he said, South Carson Street can be expected to lose 20,000 cars a day, considerably lightening the load currently carried by Carson City streets.

While downtown businesses experienced reductions in foot traffic during Carson Street construction, many had said throughout the process that the inconveniences caused by construction this year will be made up for in the years to come after the project is done.

Most businesses reported that confusion over street detours was the most common complaint heard from patrons, so many proprietors invested dollars in additional signage to ensure their customers could still visit their establishments.

“From what I've heard, the businesses have generally thought the construction was less impactful that they thought,” Rotter commented. “A lot of that was having a full-time on-site foreman from Q&D that did a great job of communicating and being flexible with access closures and utility swaps.”

The Downtown Carson Street Corridor Improvement Project was funded, in part, by existing utility funds as well as by the one-eighth percent sales tax increase passed by the Carson City Board of Supervisors in late 2014.

The section of Carson Street between William and Fifth streets is now permanently reduced to one lane in each direction with a center median, much wider sidewalks, and crosswalks that are 40 percent shorter, Pittenger told Carson Now in January.

Along with designated bicycle lanes on each side of the street, there are also pull-in parking zones.

Downtown businesses and Carson City residents will be breathing a collective sigh of relief at Friday’s ribbon cutting and during Saturday’s parade, because Rotter said Q&D Construction crews are currently ahead of schedule, putting the finishing touches on paver crosswalks that were originally expected to be completed in November.

“I’ve been very impressed with Q&D and putting together a plan to finish the paver crosswalks for Nevada Day, ahead of the original schedule,” he said. “We will all be very glad to be in clean up mode the end of next week.”

Even though the street work will cease by Friday, Rotter said, that doesn’t mean the orange cones and hard hats will disappear right away.

There is still a smattering of clean-up work to be done, he said, like removing concrete splatters, checking the plants for irrigation leaks, some signage work, and inspecting electrical outlets, to name a few.

“It will be punch-list work,” Rotter said. “That is, all the small details.”