On the morning of April 19, the Village of Homer Glen and the Homer Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, along with representatives for Stanley Consultants, hosted a meeting to provide an update on 159th street construction, set to resume next month.
“The significant thing that’s about to happen with the spring weather is we’re going to really get into some construction on the south side of the corridor,” said Janie Patch, economic development director for the Village of Homer Glen. “What is happening right now is preparations to switch the traffic to the north side.”
The crews have been working on utility relocation as of late.
“We’re done with utilities,” said Mike McCoy, senior resident project representative for Stanley Consultants. “I’ll never say 100 percent because… we’re going to be fighting with them struggling with them throughout the whole job. In general, utility relocations part is done.”
Around the first week of May, the construction job will be switched from Gougar to Will Cook roads. The roadwork will be in Stage I at this point. That’s when portable business identifications signs, which are designed to conform to Illinois Department of Transportation standards, will be rolled out.
“It looks like we’re probably going to do it the week of the eighth of May through our sign contractor,” Patch said.
Last year, crews worked on the roads extending approximately from Gougar Road to the Loyola Center for Health at Homer Glen.
“We’ll start work on the south side on 159th [Street,]” McCoy said. “You can see we started work a couple weeks ago between Gougar and Cedar [roads.] We started the Stage I work on the south side. That’ll just proceed.”
The village anticipates getting all lanes on the south side constructed to serve as the new concrete road prior to the start of winter, at which point traffic will be switched from the north side.
Next year, work will begin on the north side under Stage II construction. Following that, Stage III consists of maintenance. This, too, is when the median will be constructed and planted with trees.
“We think end of 2018 is a realistic date to get all the roadwork done,” McCoy said. “Probably, 2019 we’ll still have landscaping and clean-up kind of work. I don’t think we’ll get the all the job completely done by the end of 2018, but hopefully, we’ll get all the roadwork done and the traffic on the new four-way [road.]”
Lisa Thomas, an employee for Rush Mechanical Contractor, dropped in for the update.
“Right now, everything’s been fine,” she said. “We do have a lot of semis coming in and out. That was my concern. [I] wanted to see if they were going to the have turning lanes coming in and out, which they do. So, that will be fine. As the trucks can get in to get to us, that’d be fine.”
Thomas said she found the meeting to be informative.
“Actually, I didn’t know about the turning lanes,” she said. “This is my first time coming to the meeting.”
Thomas said she wanted to get an update on the whole timeline for the project “because it is a bit muddy and dirty coming in and out.”
“As long as we can get in and out, that’s our only issue,” she said.