Bill Koelling and Max came out of their front door at 2530 20th St. Tuesday morning. In what has become a regular routine over the past six weeks, Max bolted across the grass, yipping at the men working in the street.
“That little dog is going to miss us,” one of the Great Bend Street Department crew members said, as he petted an eager Max on his furry head.
It was in July that the city, with help from Venture Corporation, ripped out the old, crumbling asphalt in the 2500 block of 20th and the intersecting two blocks of Odell between 19th and 21st streets. This left Koelling and the other residents in the area without access to their driveways.
Tuesday, however, saw the street department doing the last of meticulous curb and gutter work. By Friday, the cement will have hardened, and all the orange cones and street barricades will be gone.
“We don’t know whether the mayor is going to be out for the ribbon cutting or the governor,” Koelling said jokingly.
“Seriously, it will be nice to have our street back,” he said. “They’ve done a very nice job.”
And it has been one heck of a job. “It’s been miserable,” said Street Department Supervisor Jim Giles.
Sweat glistened on the faces, arms and legs of Giles and the others on the crew finishing up the work early Tuesday, and the temperature was only in the 80s. There have been weeks straight when the guys were out in the 100-plus degree weather.
“It’s been a lot of work,” Giles said, taking a break to get a drink of water from a large, orange cooler. Giles and another man have gotten sick from the heat.
“This has taken us longer than we figured on,” Giles said. “Mother Nature has had other plans.”
The heat has plagued both man and material, and even the scant rains caused delays.
But, “I’m happy with how it turned out,” the supervisor said. This project allowed his department the opportunity to do the more curb and gutter work, which is as much art as it is anything.
“That’s what takes the most time,” he said. After the wooden and metal forms are in place and the soggy, grey cement poured, a device, called a “mule” is slid along the top to form a rough shape of a curb and gutter. However, “there is a lot of hand work involved” as someone with a trowel must smooth the edges and do the final shaping.
They also gave each of the residents an 11-foot wide approach to their driveways and redid a storm drain.
Going back to July, the first step was to strip the 50-year-old asphalt off the streets. This milling was done by Venture.
The Street Department then did the final milling to provide a smooth bed and poured the seven or so inches of cement for the streets themselves. “We did all the concrete work,” Giles said.
The old surface will be ground up and used as millings if future street projects.
Giles and his crews tackle a street or two each year, depending on funding and other demands on his personnel.
“It’s a slow process,” he said. “We can’t do them all in the same year.”
The work at the intersection was one of the projects already in the city’s maintenance budget. There are some smaller projects left for this year, but this was the last major undertaking.
Concrete was used in this case because the other adjoining streets were also concrete, said Street Department Director Don Craig. The city can do concrete for less money that hiring a contractor, but doesn’t have the equipment to handle asphalt paving and would have to bid out that work.
In 2008, Great Bend voters authorized a $5 million bond issue and a half-cent sales tax  designated for street improvements and the city launched on a 10-year program to upgrade all the streets. The work done at 20th and Odell is not part of that.
City Administrator Howard Partington said there are sales tax-funded asphalt street projects in the works for this fall, including stretches of Morphy and Odell.
Meanwhile, Koelling said he’s lived on the block since he was a small child, moving there in 1946 when the street was nothing but sand. Curbs and gutters were added later, and eventually in the 1950s, it was paved.
This marked the first reworking of the T-shaped portion of street since then. “It could not be patched,” Giles said.
There is one downside to the new street. Since it runs next to Great Bend High School, “it’s nothing but a race track” for teenage motorists, Giles said.