College Avenue to close June 30 for Bloomington Convention Center skywalk enclosure

Another temporary shutdown of College Avenue south of 3rd Street, which is related to Bloomington Convention Center expansion, got approval from the city’s board of public works on Tuesday (June 2).

The timing of the College Avenue closure, between 3rd and 2nd streets, runs from June 30 through July 24.

The street closure is needed in order to finish enclosing the skywalk connector, which will link the new convention center expansion on the east side of College Avenue to the existing facility on the west side. The request also covers temporary closure of the west-side sidewalk and the existing east-side pedestrian diversion.

It was engineering field specialist Zach Bell who presented the request to the board. The request from Weddle Bros., which is the construction manager for the expansion project, also includes a waiver of the noise ordinance.

Bell noted that the timing of the closure will have to be carefully coordinated with a separate paving project on Rogers Street, which will likely carry much of the detour traffic. The same set of detours will be used as in late January, when College Avenue was closed for the initial work to install the skywalk.

Public works director Adam Wason told the board the city is anticipating additional, shorter closures later tied to the public art component of the project that will attach to the skywalk. The public art project, which was selected a couple of weeks ago, centers on the skywalk. But the public art project will not see installation work during the window between June 30 and July 24, Wason said.

Board member Kyla Cox Deckard pressed for an explanation of the coordination between the paving and concrete work scheduled on Rogers Street, which has served as a primary alternate route when College has been closed.

Wason said the city’s goal is to keep Rogers Street open for through-traffic while College Avenue is shut down, and to confine lane restrictions on Rogers to concrete work rather than full closures.

There could be times where paving work is being done on Rogers Street while College Avenue is undergoing paving work, Wason told the board. He added that the detailed schedule for the Rogers project “is still being worked out,” but stressed that the lane closures for the Rogers Street project are only related to concrete work.

The paving portion of the Rogers project, Wason said, would be handled under flagging operations rather than a full detour, so that it does not conflict with the need to route traffic around the College Avenue shutdown.

Wason reminded the board that previously, in late January, College Avenue had seen a major closure for the convention center expansion. That came when IU and MCCSC were both in session. But that closure was accomplished without the kind of traffic backups that had been feared.

“We were all really, really worried about the first closure, and that was during the school year—that was when we had the whole population of Bloomington,” Wason said. “We didn’t have any issues, we didn’t see a lot of backups. We can manage the traffic to work a little differently, but everything we had fears about didn’t really come to fruition, so that was good.”

About the noise permit, which allows construction work at night, Weddle Bros. construction manager Andrew Scere told the board it’s not planned that any work will be done at night. But the permit gives some flexibility if it is needed, in order to hit the July 24 end date for the College Avenue closure. It’s for “crunch time with an unforeseen condition or something like that,” Scere said.