Emergency reconstruction set for Mancelona Road

MANCELONA – Winter is hard on C-38, more commonly known as the Mancelona Road. So are gas and oil trucks, and logging trucks. It's also a main commuters' route between Mancelona and I-75.

So Burt Thompson, manager/engineer of the Antrim County Road Commission, had been monitoring the condition of the Mancelona Township thoroughfare for the past several years, knowing it would need reconstruction soon.

In fact, it was scheduled to be completely re-surfaced next year. But the road, and Mother Nature, decided that at least part of it should be done this year – in fact, as soon as possible.

"In December of last year, we had a number of weather events that caused the road surface to freeze, then thaw a few days later, which caused a lot of the road to buckle," Thompson said earlier this week. "Plus we had a lot of rain.

"That combination accelerated the pavement deterioration tremendously," he said.

Trying to stave off the inevitable, Thompson's crew did a lot of patching and hole-filling on the road earlier this spring.

But that didn't do a lot to help, especially with more freeze and thaw cycles since then.

Faced with multiple complaints about driving conditions on the road, which runs for 11 miles from the Mancelona village limits to the Otsego County line, Thompson quickly began obtaining bid packages to present to his three-member road commission board for resurfacing of the worst portion of the road.

Team Elmer's, of Traverse City was the paving company with the lowest bid for the project, which involves a complete resurfacing of both the eastbound and westbound lanes of the Mancelona Road from Anger Road to Bocook Road, a distance of approximately three miles.

"Actually, Elmer’s came in below my estimate at $410,000," Thompson said. "Our initial bid request was for two miles but we decided to increase this to three miles due to the lower than estimated prices. And we need to replace as much as possible."

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