Arkansas Department of Transportation Director Lorie Tudor told local business leaders and government officials on Thursday that completing the widening of Interstate 30 between the Highway 70 interchange and Benton by 2025 is "optimistic."
While the current estimated completion date on the ArDOT website is Jan. 2, 2025, Tudor said the project is unlikely to be completed by that date.
"The recovery schedule states it's January 2025, but right now they fallen behind on that schedule," Tudor said during Thursday morning's meeting in the Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort Event Center.
"So all I can tell you right now is 2025 is optimistic if we keep doing what we've been doing. So at this point, that's where we're at."
The failure of the westbound lanes of the highway between Benton and Highway 70 is due to a culmination of several issues including weather and Johnson Brothers Corp., which has the contract for the widening of I-30, failing to complete the job in the contracted amount of time.
"When a pothole appears, the science behind that is when there's a freeze, the water seeps into the pavement and there's a freeze and that water expands," Tudor said.
"Then when it thaws, it creates a bubble. And when a truck -- and you know how many trucks are on that -- and regular cars hit it, it knocks out the pavement, and we've had some huge potholes out there. And we had areas where the pavement was actually failing."
Tudor said Johnson Brothers failed to maintain the integrity of the highway through the winter weather event that hit the state starting Jan. 14.
"We didn't feel like the contractor who's responsible for maintaining that pavement did a good enough (job)," she said. "We weren't happy with the performance of maintaining that pavement through that event. So Monday of this week, we had a meeting, and we determined that we were going to take over -- ArDOT is going to take over maintaining those westbound lanes of traffic from this point forward."
ArDOT has a direct contract with McGeorge Contracting to take over the failed section while Johnson Brothers, which has not been paid since April 30, 2023, due to going over their contract date, works to "get traffic on new pavement."