Elkins crews touch up lines, crosswalks
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ELKINS -- In recent weeks the City of Elkins Street Department has been hard at work knocking things off its to-do list for summer projects.
Scheduled paving recently wrapped with the completion of work on 11th Street, and Street Department crew members have been out-and-about this week putting new paint down on crosswalks and parking spaces.
"This week we've been doing a little painting and sprucing up the town for the Fourth of July," Shawn Akers, Elkins Street Department supervisor, told the Inter-Mountain Wednesday. "Every summer around this time we do the cross walks to try and get things ready before the car show. We go out and do every one of them across town, so it takes a little bit of time."
Besides painting crosswalks and touching up lines, the Street Department also made a few changes to some of the parking areas, including in front of the Station Square Office Complex and Delmonte Market in Elkins Town Square.
"We changed the parking lines around the Delmonte on Railroad Avenue this week," said Akers. "We did that so the businesses could get more parking in that area. The new spots are painted in an angle, where before the spots were nose to tail."
City of Elkins Operations Manager Mike Keseker said the changes made next to Town Square will benefit both customers and businesses.
"We did that simply because I feel like there's a lot of space down there that wasn't being used," said Keseker. "We knew if we changed the parking to diagonal it would increase the amount of parking, increase business, and make it more friendly for people to pull in and back out.
"We worked hand-in-hand with the Delmonte to make sure they were OK with what we were going to do and I'm glad we were able to accomplish that. Right after we painted the new spots they were full of vehicles."
West Virginia Paving was in charge of the milling and paving work that recently concluded. Street Department employees handled traffic control for the projects.
"The company (WV Paving) came in and did a great job, and our street guys that helped them and worked with them, I can't speak highly enough about the job they did," said Keseker. "Too often public employees don't get told when they do a great job, they only get told when something falls through the cracks or something doesn't go as planned. But these guys did a tremendous job and I'm really proud of them. Shawn and his crew do a tremendous job."
Jones Drive, Edgewood Lane, Bridgewater Drive, Tygart Court, Valley Court, Fourth Street from Davis to Railroad, Wilson Street, Moose Alley and Elm Street all received some of the 1,500 tons of asphalt the City of Elkins put down during the project.
"We were really excited about how much we were able to accomplish during the paving project," Keseker said. "Especially with the price of blacktop going up more than what we projected. We were still able to find a way to make our paving plan work.
"I think that the streets that we did look great and I think the citizens are very happy having new, fresh blacktop down in certain areas."
Akers said even though the paving and most of the line painting is wrapped up, there is still work to be done this summer by his department.
"We have some storm drain work to do and some regular maintenance," he said. "We always have a lot of stuff to take care of during the summer months."