MINOT – The surveyor stakes in Marilyn Rogers front yard along Minot Avenue are a little misleading, she said.

Contractors began work on the first phase of the $2.8 million Minot Avenue restructuring project Friday, surveying the extent of the work and clearing trees along both sides of the road.

Last week, state surveyors put the stakes in front of Rogers’ house, about 20 feet in from the edge of Minot Avenue. To the untrained eye, it looks like the revamped and widened road will eat up most of her front yard.

That’s not the case, she said. The stakes mark the states’ right of way and help surveyors determine the center of the road. Rather than moving 20 feet closer to her house, the road will move about 2 feet closer and will feature new paved shoulders, a curb and road drainage.

“I think it’s going to be much better,” Rogers said Monday. “It’s certainly going to look nicer, and putting a curb there will be a big improvement.”

Heath Cowan, project manager for the Maine Department of Transportation, said the Minot Avenue project has been on his list for a long time.

“It never has been built to highway standards,” Cowan said. “The road has gotten busier and busier, but it’s never been updated. This really will fill in a gap between Minot and Auburn.”

The project will widen and flatten the 2.2-mile stretch between Hackett Mills Road in Minot and Hatch Road in Auburn. Lanes vary between 10 and 11 feet wide now and the state will make them all a uniformly 12 feet wide. Six-foot-wide paved shoulders will replace gravel sides and new curbs, gutters and storm drains will be built in.

“All the parts of the road where you get standing water, that’s going to dry up,” Cowan said. “Also, we’ll change some areas vertically. We’ll go along and shave off some of the hills and fill in the valleys to give cars a better line of sight.”

Crews will also move Empire Road where it crosses Minot Road about 400 feet southeast, closer to the Minot Corner United Methodist Church.

“It’s going to be brought out to meet Butler Hill Road at a simple 90-degree angle,” Cowan said. “It’ll be a four-way intersection, as opposed to the mess they have out there now.”

Emmie Merrill, MDOT resident inspector for the project, said tree clearing work would continue this week. Crews would begin digging along the road by the middle of the week, installing storm drains.

Crews plan to work through November and pick up the project in the spring. Work on the entire 2.2-mile stretch is scheduled to wrap up in Auburn late in June 2004.

[email protected]