The city of Green Park will sponsor a town-hall meeting next week for residents and businesses affected by the long-awaited redevelopment of Green Park Road.

The meeting will take place at 6:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 28, in the training facility at the Mehlville Fire Protection District’s headquarters, 11020 Mueller Road.

“Basically the meeting’s intended for residents of Green Park Road and the businesses along there to talk about what to expect with the project, kind of the timing, what’s involved (and) how the work will be sequenced, that sort of thing,” Mark Payken of Payken Consulting told the Call Friday.

Payken initially was hired by the Board of Aldermen to perform right-of-way acquisition for the project. Since then, his role has been expanded to include project management and the responsibilities a director of public works or city engineer normally would handle.

The city’s 2011 budget projects the total cost of the redevelopment of Green Park Road, including the replacement of the bridge over Gravois Creek, at $3,080,740.

Eighty percent of the road construction will be funded through a federal grant approved in 2003, which is listed in the 2011 budget as $2,464,592.

Plans call for redeveloping a roughly 6,000-foot stretch of Green Park Road from Tesson Ferry Road to Lin Valle Drive.

Green Park Road will be widened with two extra feet of lanes on each side to make 12-foot lanes.

Other improvements include a new pedestrian pathway along the road’s north side, an additional right-turn lane at the road’s intersection with Tesson Ferry Road and a new left-turn lane at Antrill Drive.

Plans also call for eliminating drop-offs and ditches from the road and replacing them with vertical curbs on each side. Because the curbing will replace ditches on each side of the road, a storm sewer will be installed across the road’s length.

Substantial grade changes also will be made at the road’s intersections with Kohrs Lane, Mueller Road and Lisa Marie Court to improve sight-line visibility and provide better curb alignment.

The Board of Aldermen voted unanimously in November to name L. Krupp Construction Inc. of Ballwin the contractor for the project. The board approved Krupp’s bid of $2,159,723.33 as the lowest and best bid of the seven submitted. Bids ranged from Krupp’s low bid to a high bid of $2.4 million.

In December, aldermen voted unanimously to name Concrete Strategies of Overland the contractor for the bridge project.

The company’s $739,596 bid was the lowest of seven submitted.

Besides the bridge work, the project will include the reconstruction of roughly 200 feet of Green Park Road. Work to be performed by Concrete Strategies on Green Park Road will include the replacement of curbing, landscaping and driveway aprons, the installation of a new asphalt pedestrian path and the installation of new storm sewers.

Elements of both projects will take place concurrently, “but they’re holding off on the heavy-excavation road building until the bridge is done and back open … The thought was you get too much going on at one time, it can be a little overwhelming for people,” Payken said.

Work will begin on the bridge project once Laclede Gas temporarily reroutes a gas main to the Green Park Commerce Center.

The city currently is in the process of obtaining demolition permits for three residences on Green Park Road between Tesson Ferry Road and Clydesdale Park, Payken said, noting the road project will commence with the demolition of those houses.

“… They’re going to start with taking the houses down and probably one and a half of those parcels will have significant grading done on it because they’re adding a third lane on the north side of the road for right turns going north on Tesson Ferry,” he said. “That grading won’t occur for a while because they have nowhere to go with the dirt because they’re shaving down the high bumps and humps on the road and filling in some of the low areas. And of course, you can’t move the dirt until you have a place to put it.”

After the houses are demolished, work on the storm sewers will begin.

“Once the houses are down, then they’ll start on the storm sewer work for the entire length of the roadway and they’ll do that in four stages. And they’ll begin at Tesson Ferry and generally speaking, work their way east. Now they’ll only open up each section at one time. They’re not going to be like working everywhere and disrupting everybody …,” he said.

The first stage of the storm sewer work will encompass the stretch of Green Park Road from Tesson Ferry Road to slightly past Mueller Road.

When that work is under way, that part of the road will be open to local traffic only — “basically that’s just intended for the people who live within that stretch of road. It will be very difficult for people from outside the area trying to get through there,” Payken said.

City officials are working closely with St. Louis County Police Department and Mehlville Fire Protection District officials to ensure adequate space for police and fire vehicles during the construction period, according to Payken.

“We want to stress at the meeting the fact that the citizens’ welfare and being able to get treatment or whatever if they get sick is primary in the city’s focus,” he said. “So we’ll do what we have to do to keep that going.”

Payken continued, “The storm sewers, as they complete each run, they back fill that and then if it’s in the driving surface, we’ll put some asphalt cold patch over it so people can drive over it. The only time really when the road will be kind of closed is when they do what we call a crossing where you have storm sewers across from each other in the road. There’s a pipe that runs underneath the road from one sewer to the other, and so you have to excavate that whole width of the roadway.”

Once all the storm sewer work is completed, he said, “The bridge should be finished by then and so that’s looking like, hopefully at the earliest June. If we have bad weather or what have you, then that would be closer to July … Once the summer comes, of course school will be out, and we won’t have to deal with school buses. That’s when they’ll start actually constructing the roadway and the first thing they’ll do is pour the curb and gutter.

“And once the curb and gutter are in, then they’ll start either excavating or filling for the interior roadway. They’ll do those in sections,” Payken said. “We’re trying to minimize the amount of disruption, but as you can imagine, whenever you’ve got to rebuild such a curvy road in tight quarters, there’s no way to completely eliminate any kind of inconvenience.”

As proposed, all work will be completed by Thanksgiving, but it could be the end of the year depending on weather and other factors, Payken said.

“They’re hoping to be done by the end of the year. It’s going to be concrete curb and gutter with an asphalt roadway and they’re going to wait on the final lift of asphalt so that they can do the whole thing at one time …,” he said.

To date, the city has spent a total of roughly $750,000 to acquire the three residences along Green Park Road and in consulting fees for right-of-way acquisition.

Green Park spent $681,522 in 2009 to purchase three properties along the road and to help relocate their former owners.

The city agreed to pay Daniel Lanham $298,000 for his land and home at 9907 Green Park Road.

The city also paid Robert and Joan Cooper $165,000 for their property at 9925 Green Park Road. Additionally, Meagan Kaiser received $200,000 for her land and home at 9915 Green Park Road.

Lanham’s land was needed for right of way and to swap St. Louis County for an equal amount of ground in Clydesdale Park that will be used to widen Green Park Road, while the other two properties were needed for a right-turn lane at Tesson Ferry Road and Green Park Road to ease traffic through the intersection.