Despite being opened for public use since August, Sherman recently saw a $102,217.41 increase to its Loy Lake Road Project.

The Sherman City Council recently approved a change order and final payment to Vessels Construction for the project. With the change order, the final price for the projected totaled $2,046,127.18. The project was paid for with money from the city’s Capital Improvement Project fund.

“This actually represents about a 5 percent increase from the original $1.9 million contract,” Director of Engineering Clint Philpott said. “Some of the changes included some retaining walls on the east side of the road, there was an Ada-compliant ramp that we had to construct at Sara Swamy at the intersection there and the other major piece was some pedestrian signal poles along the intersections to allow handicapped to push the button before they made the crosswalk.”

The work expanded the section of Loy Lake Road from East Sara Swamy Drive to U.S. Highway 82 to four lanes with a landscaped median, decorative lighting and a dedicated turn lane. The Sam’s Club driveway onto Loy Lake Road was also relocated so it lined up with Gallagher Road and its four-way traffic signal.

The council originally awarded a $1,943,909.77 contract for the Loy Lake Road expansion in May 2016 to Vessels Construction. When the roadway was opened in August of last year, Mayor David Plyler said the work was finished on time and on budget. Vessels Construction’s bid was more than $300,000 under the project engineer’s estimate and the city originally estimated the cost of the project at $2.5 million.

“It is customary at the end of the project to have a reconciling change order either up or down for a job,” City Manager Robby Hefton said. “It just so happened for this one, because of the size and scope of the job, it made sense, instead of coming back 12 different times for different things, to kind of bundle them all up and bring them at one time. And just as is the case with any change order like this, you can generally attribute 80 percent of the value of a change to really just a handful of items.”

Philpott said the majority of the increase came from those changes he mentioned.

“It was field changes really,” Philpott said. “It just made sense to put in the brick retaining walls. It has a better look. The property owners are very happy with it.”

He said the original plan was to have fewer of the pedestrian signal poles, but that’s not how things worked out.

“Once you get to an intersection and the streetlight gets put in and the utility pole gets put in, you’re kind of locked where your landing needs to be,” Philpott said, explaining the landings necessitated the additional poles, just as the Americans with Disabilities Act required a change to the planned ramp. “The ramp at Sara Swamy, ADA has very specific parameters on ramps.”

Philpott said the zigzag ramp that had to be put in was a significant change from the standard ramp expected.

“These kind of added up over the project and some of them, I just made a decision that it needed to be done,” Philpott said. “Looking back, probably the ramp at Sara Swamy, I should have come and gotten approval before we started that. But there’s a lot of other minor stuff that are quantity changes — we used a lot less pipe, we did some in-house asphalt changes — so a lot of these are just kind of finalizing the unit prices.”