LEWISTON — Two projects aimed at widening Lincoln Street south of the downtown area should kick off later this summer.

Crews have already started removing trees and landscaping along Lincoln Street south of Gully Brook to get ready for the work. 

City of Lewiston Project Engineer Jeffrey Beaule said work should move into a more active phase in the next two weeks. Crews from Gendron and Gendron will dig up the road to install new road drains, build new retaining walls and move utility poles.

“We have 52 utility poles, then we have 9,000 feet of drainage pipe to put in,” Beaule said. Work removing all of the old pavement and putting down new asphalt should begin in September, he said, adding that the project wouldn’t be finished until the summer of 2012.

Bids for the second project, to widen the Lincoln and Locust streets intersection, are scheduled to go out in two weeks. Beaule said he expects that work, which adds turn lanes to all four parts of the intersection, will be finished before summer ends.

Both projects are designed to widen the road. The Locust Street intersection project will widen the turning radius there, making it easier for turning trucks to navigate.

The longer-term project will add about 8 feet to Lincoln Street’s width from the bridge over Gully Brook to about South Avenue. Where possible, Beaule said, the road will be widened on the river side.

“If you look right now, you can see the orange marks on the road, and that’s where the new center line will be,” he said. “It shifts back and forth, but we tried to expand where we’d have the least amount of impact. That’s why we pushed it out on the river side where we could, instead of affecting houses and properties on the other side.”

In addition to new drainage, plans call for two new retaining walls, one along the river side of Lincoln Street near Merton Boulevard and a second near South Avenue. The road will get granite curbs, but no new sidewalks.

“The long-term plan is to put an off-street bike path there, but closer to the river,” Beaule said. “We just didn’t have enough money to do that now.”

Beaule said the Locust Street intersection work is budgeted at $800,000 — about $300,000 for actual road work and the rest for land acquisition and property demolition. 

The longer project is expected to cost $2.9 million. A federal highway grant is paying 80 percent of that cost; the state is picking up 10 percent and the city is paying 10 percent, Beaule said.

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