In McCleary, the end of May kicked off a summer of sidewalk building and road maintenance that finished at the end of September with road striping. The first project, installing new sidewalks along West Maple Street between the Beehive Retirement Community and Main Street, took nearly a month and a half. Now the south side of the street is both walkable and ADA compliant.

“This makes it really easy for the citizens who live in the Beehive to have a safe path that they can go out and stretch out their legs,” said Jon Martin, city administrator.

A $520,000 grant and a city match of $33,000 funded the sidewalk construction. Martin said they are pursuing another grant to install a sidewalk on the other side of the street. This is the reason for the plastic posts on the corner of South 4th Street and West Maple Street that are serving as placeholders for the future sidewalk.

“Part of the requirement of the grant is for the safety of people walking and what it does is it keeps the cars from cutting the corners,” said Martin.

The road maintenance, which took the form of chip seal, began at the end of July and continued into the first week of August. Funding for the chip seal was through a Transportation Improvement Board (TIB) grant for $293,000 with a city match of $14,000.

“We don’t have the funds to do this stuff, so we were very lucky on getting that [grant],” said Martin.

The project did have a bit of a snag because the original bid hadn’t accounted for McCleary’s streets having irregular widths.

“Typically [the cost is] calculated on the street length, not the width, so we weren’t able to do all the streets that we originally wanted to do,” Martin said.

A call to TIB and some cost-savings on the city’s part cobbled enough money together to finish the project.

Martin said that the reaction from the community has been “really positive” and the project “turned out really well.”

Looking ahead to future roadwork, with the majority of the city streets now chip sealed, the focus is on maintenance and pothole repairs, Martin said. The chip seal extends the life of the road by about five years before the asphalt needs to be replaced.

The city’s next project is finishing the 3rd Street Project, and a bid is out for engineering services. Martin describes this sidewalk project as similar to Maple Steet sidewalk project but on a larger scale. A federal grant specifically for rural communities will fund this $2.5 million project.

A number of streets in the city were also chip sealed, and this work began at the end of July and continued into the first week of August. The striping was completed at the end of September.