Winter Springs road resurfacing overhaul nears completion 

Work on infrastructure in Winter Springs continues as the city nears the end of its overhaul of some of its worst roads through a massive resurfacing project approved by the City Commission on Feb. 10. 

Work began on the 22 road areas deemed by the city to be in need of repair on Feb. 20, with 15 of them currently completed, including portions of Holiday Lane, Saranac Drive and Turkey Hollow Circle. 

As the project has moved forward, Winter Springs public information officer Mathew Reeser said the city has created a webpage to ensure residents would have access to the most current information, with it being updated daily. 

“When this project kicked off, because of the size and the scope of it, it was going to impact a lot of our residents traffic-wise, noise-wise, those kinds of things,” Reeser said. 

This is in addition to the city’s alert system notices to specific neighborhoods where road work is taking place, a move Reeser said is intended to keep residents informed while “not bothering” those who don’t typically use the specific roads or would not be impacted by the work. 

“We really wanted to ramp up the messaging to let them know that this was going on,” Reeser said. “Because one of the things was, people [previously] were saying, ‘I may have thought a little bit about not driving down that way at that particular time.’ It was never anything too significant, but we thought this was the best way, and it’s been received pretty well from residents.”

The $940,000 project comes from the Transportation Improvement Fund, which Reeser said is generated from taxes paid on gasoline.

The resurfacing of certain roadways included in the project on the west side of the city like Alton and Sailfish Road was previously brought up by Deputy Mayor Cade Resnick during the commission’s Feb. 10 meeting, as he expressed concern moving forward without the completion of certain culvert stormwater expansions. 

Public works director Phil Hursh explained that the timeline for the stormwater study and conceptual designs needed for the work would be too far out to allow delay. 

In the meantime, he said, if the city were to allow the roads on the west side to go any further without being fixed, they would ultimately be more costly to repair in the long run. 

The roadways put forward for the first round of resurfacing by Hursh were the ones most problematic or in need of repair, Reeser said, adding that there’d be “more of these kinds of projects down the road.” He said the date for the next round of resurfacing is not yet known — though it is expected to occur within the year — but that the public works department is currently identifying other roads in need of work or repair. 

Work on the project has moved quickly, with the resurfacing of some of the last remaining roads continuing, like the in-need portion of Blumberg Avenue scheduled for this week. That’s the day Reeser said the city also expects about 90% of the project to be completed. 

“The last segment should be our Central Winds Parkway, and we’ve held off on that one because it’s so close to Winter Springs High School and [the charter school] Choices In Learning,” Reeser said. “We wanted to wait until they were on spring break, and then we’re going to do that starting Monday evening, Tuesday morning.” 

He said the road is also the only access point for charter school students to enter, and that many parents use Central Winds Park to pick up their children since it can be difficult to move through Hicks Avenue. 

“We didn’t want to have parents not having a place to safely pick up their children and have all this heavy equipment, so we decided to move that off … to make sure that the schools are not going to be impacted by this,” Reeser said. 

Residents visiting the park are advised to enter from Tuskawilla Road through the entrance at Orange Avenue and use the upper ball field parking lot while work is in progress.

The project’s current target date for completion is March 21, permitting obstacles such as inclement weather. 

The city also announced plans to begin work on a stormwater repair project that will close a portion of South Moss Road starting March 17, repairing the base of and replacing a collapsing box culvert located underneath the roadway.

The culvert project is expected to be completed by March 21, pending delays from inclement weather. 

“So that’s part of our storm water program, to try and make sure all of the bridges and culverts and stream crossings can handle any significant rains or storm water that we get,” Reeser said. “We’re coming up on hurricane season here in a couple more months.”

While the resurfacing project isn’t necessarily a countermeasure for hurricane impacts, he said by completing the work now there’s less chance of roads deteriorating from significant storms if water comes up on the roadways. 

“If you have a road that’s starting to crumble or has potholes, then the base layer is exposed, and that can wash away which can cause more damage to the road,” Reeser said.

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