BY ANDY GARDNER
North Country This Week

The St. Lawrence County Highway Department will focus on road work and bridge projects as they head into the summer while having to maintain coronavirus precautions on the job. However, they might be paying high prices for asphalt.

County Highway Superintendent Don Chambers said that to the Board of Legislators Finance Committee during their Monday, April 27 meeting held online via Zoom and streamed live on YouTube.

He said the focus this summer will be to “keep road projects and bridge projects we definitely need to get done, keep those on track as much as possible.”

That’s amid highway workers “keeping social distancing and wearing PPE” on the job, Chambers said.

He said they are looking at splitting the work crews into smaller groups, “basically to try to have some isolation between the work groups.” A crew could possibly “work one week and take the next off and have the corresponding other half of the crew come in the next week.”

Meanwhile, Chambers said the county is looking at having to pay higher prices for asphalt, even though the cost of gasoline is going down.

“Even though there’s extremely low oil prices, there’s also extremely low output of the refineries, which in turn reduces the supply of asphalt, dramatically,” he said. “There’s likely to be quite a disconnect this season of what you see as oil prices and the actual asphalt … in the market.”

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