By Scott Taylor,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – City leaders hope a deal with natural gas provider Northern Utilities will keep summer traffic woes from getting worse.

They’re working with the utility to time dozens of projects in the city streets to save money and cut down on traffic delays. Those include water and sewer work and road paving projects as well as Northern Utilities’ gas main replacement work.

“What we don’t want is to finish work on one road and have them come along and tear it back up,” said Paul Boudreau, Lewiston Public Works director.

City road crews and contractors should begin most of their work in the next few weeks. Some work has started downtown, along Lisbon and Chestnut streets. But most will begin later, with downtown projects expanding to Canal Street later this summer, paving work planned along Sabattus Street and water line projects continuing along Ferry Road.

Northern Utilities is already under way, however. The company began replacing gas mains along Pond Road last week and should begin work along Bates Street this week. Work on those streets should continue into June.

Lewiston crews will come along after the utility has finished, replacing those roads. That should be the pattern for much of the summer, Boudreau said. The company will do its work, followed by city paving crews.

“That’s not the way I think they’d prefer to do it,” Boudreau said. “I think they’d rather start at one end of the city and work to the other, just digging up everything along the way.”

The company is being required to replace all cast-iron gas mains in Lewiston and Auburn in the next four years. That’s a settlement worked out between the company and the state Public Utilities Commission in the wake of a January 2004 explosion on Main Street in Lewiston. That explosion, blamed on a leaking Northern Utilities gas line, leveled the old Hotel Holly and the Lewiston Radiator Works. Five people were injured in that explosion.

The project in Lewiston is massive, Boudreau said. It involves digging at 1,700 sites across the city and replacing 38 miles of gas pipe.

“Combined with what we have to do, you could have roads dug up all summer,” Boudreau said. “We could finish one project only to have them come in. So we are really grateful that they’re working with us.”

The company will work primarily in Lewiston for the next two years, replacing all of the cast iron pipes in the city except for those under Lincoln and Cedar streets. Then work will move to Auburn. The company will replace their lines in New Auburn and Lewiston’s Lincoln and Cedar streets at the same time, in the fourth year.

“That’s a good thing, because we just finished Lincoln Street and we’d like to get a few years out of it before we start digging it up again,” he said.

Bob Belz, Auburn Public Works director, said he expects to come up with similar plan when work moves across the river in 2007.