Mayor Rahm Emanuel today announced that with the support of Governor Pat Quinn and the General Assembly, the City secured an additional $12.5 million in state funding to add to the 2014 arterial street repaving plan and bolster a program to perform patching work on hundreds of streets across Chicago.

“With this additional investment, we will increase our workload to restore more of Chicago’s arterial streets that were damaged by the extremely harsh winter weather earlier this year,” Mayor Emanuel said. “Block by block, we are building a new Chicago, and improving the quality of life in neighborhoods across Chicago. We appreciate the support from Governor Pat Quinn and the General Assembly to help restore our roadways.”

"These projects will protect our roads, improve transportation and put people to work," Governor Quinn said. "This state investment is an ideal combination of maintaining our infrastructure and creating jobs."

Mayor Emanuel was joined by Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd)  during a visit to the 4500 block of South Martin Luther King Drive, which is being resurfaced as part of a $4 million, nearly two-mile-long paving project between 37th and 51st Streets, the longest stretch of resurfacing completed in the city so far this year.

"Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive is the most recognizable street of the Bronzeville community connecting residents and businesses to schools, jobs, churches, families and friends,” Ald. Pat Dowell said. “This is more than an investment in a road. It is an investment in the future of an important historic Chicago neighborhood.”

With the additional $12.5 million funding from the Illinois Department of Transportation, City agencies and private utilities plan to resurface a total of more than 355 miles of arterial and neighborhood streets and alleys in 2014.  

The additional funds will add to the overall resurfacing program and expand a CDOT program of heavy-duty grinding and patching for streets that do not need a full resurfacing, but have shown significant deterioration from the winter.   

CDOT will use the additional funds in the following ways:
•    $9.5 million to do approximately nine miles of additional arterial street resurfacing
•    $2 million to do grind-and-patch work on 150 more blocks
•    $1 million to resurface and patch more than 1.5 miles of streets before new bike lanes are installed

In Mayor Emanuel’s first term in office, nearly a quarter of Chicago’s 4,600 miles of streets will have been resurfaced.

Under the mayor’s Building a New Chicago infrastructure investment program, CDOT, the Department of Water Management (DWM), private contractors and utilities will have resurfaced more than 1,000 miles of streets from 2011 through 2014 (155 miles in 2011; 269 miles in 2012; 290 miles in 2013; and 355 miles in 2014).

DWM plans to increase its workload in 2014 to install 85 miles of new water mains and 21 miles of new sewer mains, reline 51 miles of sewer mains and install 15,000 new water meters. DWM will also repave 133 miles of roadway.

In 2014, CDOT plans to repave more than 109 miles of arterial streets, 90 miles of residential streets and five miles of alleys. Gas, electric and telecommunication utilities are expected to repave 20 miles of streets as part of their infrastructure work.

With better coordination on infrastructure improvement projects through CDOT’s Project Management Office, both departments and the utilities worked together to reduce the amount of project conflicts that would open up a street more than once. By setting new standards for restoring the public way after construction, the various utilities resurfaced more miles of Chicago streets.

In 2013, the City realized a savings of approximately $14 million through the coordination of projects with utilities and the requirements that they fully restore the roadways after their construction projects.

The projects build upon Governor Quinn’s $31 billion Illinois Jobs Now! construction program, the largest in the state’s history, includes investments of $303 million to reconstruct Wacker Drive in downtown Chicago, $410 million for the ongoing Circle Interchange reconstruction, $646 million to rebuild the Chicago Transit Authority’s Red Line, and $99 million to rehabilitate the Blue Line.

# # #