Reader question: Country Club Road runs between West Mason Street and Indian Hill Drive. It serves as the main access road to [Northeast Wisconsin Technical College] as well as the neighborhoods beyond and is heavily traveled. The road is of concrete construction and was always one of the roughest roads (in my opinion) in the county.
This summer and fall, I believe extensive water main and storm sewer work was done. Those projects have resulted in numerous asphalt patches in the driving surface making the road even more uncomfortable to drive.
Are [there] plans to completely rebuild this road now that the water main and storm sewer work is done?
Answer: Ka-THUNK. Ka-THUNK. That’s the sound of 2,300 cars every day going over Country Club Road riddled with what Director of Public Works Steve Grenier characterized as “failed joints every 15 feet.”
Like chipped grout between bathroom tiles, the joints between each stretch of concrete have wasted away beyond repair for three-quarters of a mile due to their original construction method, according to the public works director. It leaves his department no choice but to completely reconstruct the road, Grenier said. The state of the roadway showed up on the department’s radar about 2010.
“Normally, we would consider a joint repair first, but that is not possible with the type of pavement deterioration we have going on,” Grenier said.
Furrows of missing concrete around the joints likely came from repeated freeze-thaw cycles and the use of subpar materials, according to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Transportation Information Center’s concrete road manual and its section detailing the causes of defects.
Though the rest of the road’s surface is fairly smooth, the joints’ resemblance to freshly-tilled field rows is severe enough to bring down the overall score of the road’s conditions to a 4 out of 10 on the PASER scale, also developed by UW-Madison’s Transportation Information Center to measure pavement quality. It’s a grade just one notch above what’s considered “poor,” and puts Country Club Road on par with the many bumpy streets across the city rated at a 4 or below, like Shawano Avenue east of Oneida Street and Lime Kiln Road.
And while a 4-rated road typically doesn’t warrant rebuilding from scratch, Grenier said the joint failures are “significantly lower than [a 4] … The only thing to do is reconstruct and start over.”
Once the Wisconsin Department of Transportation opens the project up for interested contractors for bids starting March 11, reconstruction isn’t likely start until May, and will finish around mid-November, according to Grenier.
Costs are estimated somewhere northward of $4 million, according to WisDOT.
The money is anticipated to come at least in part from the Surface Transportation Block Grant program and federal dollars first appropriated in the Obama years through the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, as indicated by WisDOT’s Statewide Transportation Improvement Program packet.
Road damage on Country Club Road near the Northeast Wisconsin Technical College campus in Green Bay.
Do you have a question about Green Bay? Send them to Jesse Lin at 920-834-4250 or jlin@gannett.com to look into and come back with an answer every Monday.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Road reconstruction on Country Club Road in Green Bay to begin in 2025
