Highway, airport, other work add up to more than $5 million in summer projects.   7/21/2009 by Wayne Nelson

(Photo by Lois Carlson, Madeline Island Chamber of Commerce. Aggregate had to be brought in by barge for highway and airport taxiway construction on Madeline Island.)

Idyllic Madeline Island in the Apostle Island chain is accessible only by water (except in winter) and heavy freight arrives or leaves via barge or ferry.

That includes construction supplies and equipment, and adds significant costs for major projects, like several scheduled this summer. But Ashland County, Town of La Pointe and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Aeronautics began working together more than a year ago to bundle several paving projects to hold down costs. The list included rebuilding 14 miles of County Hwy H, a main northeast-southwest artery on the island, and new taxiways at its general aviation airport. Overall construction will cost more than $5 million.

Ashland County Supervisor Mike Starck, who also serves as a Town of La Point supervisor, said that three-level government cooperation has produced substantial savings for the projects about to get underway. “That kind of collaboration doesn’t happen very often,” he said.

Here are the highlights.

• The county and township jointly purchased $3.5 million of gravel for all of the projects at the same time, and began stockpiling it on the island last year. The decision to bid gravel for all the projects at once trimmed costs by more than $12 a cubic yard, Starck said.

• Meanwhile, Ashland County hired Ayres Associates, the Eau Claire engineering firm, to design the Highway H project and find ways to control both reconstruction and ongoing maintenance costs. Ayres’ search led them to a blacktopping technique called “cold in-place recycling.”

Jeff Abramson, transportation engineering supervisor at Ayres Associates, said a typical new blacktop road would have a four-inch asphalt layer. With cold in-place recycling, the existing road base will be pulverized and a stabilizing agent added to the mixture that waterproofs it. Then it will be capped with a new two-inch asphalt layer.

Abramson said the recycling process is more expensive than typical paving, but made sense in this case because it required fewer materials to be transported to the island. Costs associated with using recycled asphalt are about 25 percent less than for a new asphalt road because there’s no need for new aggregate (gravel) in the recycled pavement, he said.

The Wisconsin Department of Transportation opened bids for the Highway H rehabilitation project on June 9. Asphalt paving firm Pitlik & Wick in Eagle River, WI submitted the apparent low bid, $3,588,000. In late June, President Brian Pitlik said he was waiting for a state contract and planned to begin moving equipment — including an asphalt plant — to the island for a mid-July construction start.

He said his paving company is one of only a half dozen in Wisconsin with cold in-place recycling experience. “The technique has been around for a while and it’s popular in Europe. It produces a longer road life . . . it’s perfect for Madeline Island,” he said.

The second big summer project on Madeline Island is upgrading taxiways at the airport. Antczak Construction Co. in Rice Lake is the apparent low bidder at $1.35 million. Bids also have been let and awarded for several smaller local projects, including sidewalks in La Pointe along Rice and Main streets.

The state Transportation Department also expects to let bids this summer for paved bike paths along Hagen Road between Highway H and Big Bay State Park on the southeast side of Madeline Island.

With an asphalt plant in place, Pitlik & Wick should have a leg up on that project, and to supply asphalt to other contractors on the island this summer, as well. Pitlik said in late June he hadn’t negotiated asphalt supply agreements with other contractors, adding this is the first job for his company in the Bayfield Peninsula area, more than 100 miles from Eagle River. He cited a weak construction economy that is forcing contractors to look for jobs beyond their usual range.

While that distance isn’t a barrier for the company to employ cold in-place recycling, it will prevent Pitlik & Wick from using another of its pioneering environmentally friendly initiatives: producing asphalt from recycled roofing shingles. The construction firm is one of a half dozen in Wisconsin recycling waste shingles to recover asphalt cement.

In July 2008 the company secured a permit from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to accept and store non-asbestos asphalt shingles from waste haulers, roofing contractors and private homeowners. It bought a shredding machine and to date has ground about 2,000 tons of waste shingles.

The shingles are hauled to the construction site, ground up and added to a hot mix blend produced for the particular project. Carolyn Lurvey, the company’s environmental engineer who developed the initiative, said the firm’s laboratory is developing hot mix blends that use up to 7 percent waste shingles.

She said the company has established satellite collection points for waste shingles in Hurley and Phillips, and is eying the Duluth/Superior area, as well.

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