Carson City road work starts on Saliman

Work on a $2 million Mills Park water main project will create potential traffic congestion along Saliman Road near Carson High School next week, but Monday is a holiday.

On Monday, the city will close Saliman Road completely across from Carson High School running from the park entrance, which is at Seely Loop, on south to and including the Robinson Street intersection. With the school closed Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, significant work there will be accomplished without immediate conflict involving traffic to and from school.

The balance of the week, however, Saliman Road’s southbound lanes from the park entrance to Robinson will be closed and there will be just one northbound lane open, which creates potential traffic congestion as people drive to or from the high school grounds and some students walk to or from schood.

Rick Cooley, the city’s construction manager, detailed the week’s plan for Mark Korineck, school district operations director, going into the work period. Cooley included the Monday closure and the fact only one lane northbound would be open to traffic the remainder of the week, with nothing southbound on Saliman.

That led Korineck to put out word to high school students’ parents, as well as the students, Western Nevada College folks who hold night classes at the high school, media outlets and others, saying “access to Carson High during this (coming) week will be restricted and slow.”

Korineck added a main concern of his is sorting out for safety purposes vehicular traffic and student foot traffic as young people cross Saliman to reach or leave school under such conditions. He said the sheriff’s office will help.

Sheriff Ken Furlong said he’s planning to have volunteer patrol officers on hand to help with the problems because of the potential for access bottlenecks and the like.

“There’s going to be a lot of construction there,” Furlong said.

Carson City Public Works Director Darren Schulz said the contractor and city construction manager are taking advantage of the holiday to mitigate possible problems, though such access-related blockage spinoffs can’t be completely alleviated.

“They wanted to get in and work on things on Saliman Road just south of the high school and north to the entrance of Mills Park,” he said.

The water main project is to run east-west through Mills Park to Roop Street and improve the Carson City water system, eventually linking lines all the way to the Quill water treatment facility on the city’s west side, according to Schulz.

The project has been delayed more than once, including last year when what Schulz called “a deepening requirement” from the federal government in “Buy American” statutes put work off until this year. He said the contractor would have been ready, but vendors couldn’t supply some American-made products required to do the project after stronger language went into the American iron and steel act.

“Any time you get money from the federal government,” Schulz said last year, “they put on specific standards on how you can spend that money.”