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Vehicles travel toward Henderson on U.S. 93 near Veterans Memorial Drive in Boulder City on Friday, Feb. 25, 2011.
By Kyle B. Hansen (contact) 
Thursday, Aug. 4, 2011 | 8:29 p.m.
Sun archives
- Senate OKs bill for private toll road around Boulder City (4-26-2011)
- Experts say developing new freeway vital to Southern Nevada (4-13-2011)
- Boulder City residents say fix for traffic snarls can't come fast enough (4-7-2011)
- Boulder City tries to pass the truck back to Arizona (3-2-2011)
- NDOT accelerates plan to widen U.S. 93 near Hoover Dam bypass bridge (2-12-2011)
- Boulder City gets backing over bridge traffic complaints (12-29-2010)
- Hoover Dam bypass bridge opens to traffic (10-20-2010)
- Bridging America event draws thousands (10-16-2010)
- Hoover Dam bypass bridge gets warm welcome at dedication (10-14-2010)
Sun coverage
It normally takes 45 days from the time the Nevada Transportation Department awards a contract to the time the contractor gets the final OK to start construction — unless the project is in Boulder City.
The Transportation Department awarded a contract to Fisher Sand & Gravel on July 26 to improve U.S. 93 through Boulder City.
The $15.9 million project is a temporary, emergency fix for traffic woes that came after the Hoover Dam bypass bridge opened last fall.
Fisher already is doing startup work, although construction is waiting for paperwork from the state, including the governor’s signature.
“The second it’s signed we’ll be moving on the job,” Tommy Fisher, president of the company, said at a public meeting on the project Thursday afternoon.
The go-ahead should come by Aug. 11, just 16 days after the contract was awarded.
The contractor normally has two weeks to submit the required bonds to the state. This time, it was done in two days.
Fisher already is getting everything in place, applying for permits and getting subcontractors lined up. “We’re mobilizing equipment as we speak,” he said.
The project will widen about five miles of U.S. 93 where a bottleneck slows traffic on the main route between Las Vegas and Phoenix.
Boulder City has long been the gateway to the Hoover Dam, part of the highway link between Southern Nevada and Arizona. But after Sept. 11, 2001, trucks were banned from crossing the dam, keeping a lot of traffic off the route as Southern Nevada grew.
With the opening of the Hoover Dam Bypass, and the centerpiece Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, in October, trucks returned to the route, causing backups, especially on weekends and holidays.
When Arizona students were on spring break earlier this year, there were backups every day for a week, Boulder City Mayor Roger Tobler said.
The state has long hoped to build a freeway around Boulder City to bypass the stoplights and side streets, but funding has been short and the project hasn’t happened.
So after loud complaints from Tobler late last year, the Transportation Department developed a quick-fix plan to widen U.S. 93 so it is two lanes from Las Vegas to Arizona.
While the plan pleased Boulder City officials, leaders in Bullhead City, Ariz., were upset. They didn’t want trucks rerouted through their city near Laughlin while the construction takes place.
Project Manager Tony Lorenzi met with officials from the Arizona Department of Transportation and Bullhead City to find a solution — just some trucks will be banned and only on certain days and during certain hours.
Despite the angry rhetoric, everyone left the meeting in Bullhead City pleased, Lorenzi said.
“We left there and they were happy,” he said.
So crews will soon be working on U.S. 93, which will probably create more of a mess for Boulder City residents, but only for a little while. The department hopes to have the project done by Nov. 19, before the holiday travel season.
“This is a tall order. We have a lot of work to do in three months,” Fisher said. But it will get done on time, he said.
Tobler said he’s happy to see the work begin, but he’s not entirely satisfied with the project.
“This is short-term relief. But in the long run, this isn’t our answer,” he said. “We still need the bypass.”
Lorenzi, who is also the project manager for the bypass, said construction on Phase 1 of that project is scheduled to begin late next year.
That phase, however, is just to build a small section of the road at Railroad Pass, which will do nothing to solve the problems in Boulder City, Tobler said.
Phase 2 will be the actual freeway around Boulder City. That part of the project is still a long way off, although it could happen sooner than once expected since the Legislature passed a bill allowing the road to be the first toll road in the state.
The Transportation Department is meeting with the Regional Transportation Commission and the Federal Highway Administration later this month to discuss toll road possibilities, Lorenzi said.
Tobler is worried that even the tolls won’t generate enough money to build the whole project, but he is happy with the developments.
“Unfortunately, a crisis happened, but fortunately it did give us the exposure to get people on our side,” he said. “This isn’t just a Boulder City problem, it’s a regional issue. But Boulder has to bear the pain to bring it to light. We’re still feeling the pain.”
As for the current improvement project: “We’re excited to get this done, but we’ll see what it does,” he said.
Once the bypass is built, most of the businesses along the 'old route' will lose most of their customers and will go out of business. When that happens they will be crying that it is everyone's fault (but theirs) for them being bankrupt. They will blame the city, the county, the state and the federal government and they will ask - 'What is the government going to do to help us out?" And of course Boulder City will cry about the lose of revenue and business and (again) cry to Carson City and Washington about how they were hurt and injured by the decision to build the bypass. Happens everytime cities that depend on travelers demand that the travelers be routed around the city.
Very poor planning. Widening 95 will only encourage travelers to treat it as a freeway, and local people trying to get on and off will be smashed out of the way: it's a recipe for accidents. The acceleration/deceleration lanes are not long enough or non-existent in some cases as it is, and widening might even force them to be eliminated. BC police do a great job but aren't there all the time: what about tickets by traffic cameras? Widening 95 will also make getting the real by-pass a harder sell, and making the by-pass a toll road will also keep motorists on 95.
The problem is the truck traffic. They do not stop at any businesses including the fast food restaurants because they cant. At least the cars stop. The worst days are the weekends and yes the BC cops do a nice job, but they have no control of triple trailer UPS and Fed Ex trucks. Before you bitch at BC businesses, live this BS in BC for one weekend. And Hoss, you were always the dumb one on Bonanza. People in BC support their businesses and really do not need tourist traffic to survive. Nobody complains in the past and won't in the future. Once again, opinions are like a holes, everyone has one and they all stink.
Don't call the bypass a freeway if it's to be a toll road.
If it's a toll road, I'll drive straight through Boulder City, and so will many others.
Simply amazing, Clark County spends $12,000,000.00 million of our taxpayer dollars not to award the Beltway project to Fisher and NDOT has awarded in excess of $600,000,000.00 to Fisher where all projects have been successfully completed without claims or cost overruns.
I for one would like to see a law firm sue the County Commissioners for not doing their jobs and set a new legal precedence for us taxpayers to go after the public body for their continued waste, fraud, and abuse of our taxes that we pay into the system that the liberal's politicians continue to abuse.
JGM, let me explain this to you and everyone else that has a problem with this toll road. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. You will save nine miles in driving distance. You will drive at a constant speed. You will not stop. You will pay one dollar toll. At 3-4 bucks a gallon of gas and most trucks getting 10-15 mpg, it's a good return on investment.
Reply to BCDave: My map, which is a saved image of an NV DOT map published in the LV Sun in July 2010, shows the bypass looping down from Railroad Pass to under the Boulder City Municipal Airport, then completely under Boulder City to finally come back up and rejoin US 93 well after Lakeshore Drive. Hardly a straight line, and certainly not worth paying an extra dollar to use extra gas.
My experience with larger urban area bypasses, is that excepting weekday rush hours, it is quicker to drive straight through; for example: Houston, Jacksonville, Baltimore.