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Freeway interchange project takes another step toward reality
• Will huge project finish by 2035?
Service Mitchell Interchange design
This is the design option for a new Highway 99 interchange for Service and Mitchell roads. (The top of his map is north and the thick blue line represents Service Road). The design shows the existing Service Road overpass in green with the yellow representing new bridges to widening it. The southbound 99 off-ramp (blue) will rise over the railroad tracks and hairpin turn back up to the northwest to a new intersection on Service Road west of the freeway. Northbound 99 traffic would still be able to get off at Mitchell Road but will also be able to take a new Service Road exit. The N/B Service Road onramp will cut through what is now the Brickit Court industrial park. - photo by Courtesy of the city of Ceres

The city advanced last week on what has been a long and tedious process of working toward a new freeway interchange at Service and Mitchell roads.

The Ceres City Council allocated $5 million in grant funds for the preliminary engineering, environmental documentation, and final design for the project.

The funding come from the Congestion and Mitigation Air Quality (CMAQ) Improvement Program but only covers a little over half the work.

“So this $5 million will be added to an authorized total amount of about $8.65 million of the $9.94 million that is needed,” said City Engineer Michael Beltran. He said the city will look for opportunities to fill the about $1.2 million gap but could fall back on StanCOG to tap into Ceres’ share regional funds.

“We just want to save as much of that (StanCOG) funding as we can for right-of-away acquisition services and construction matching funds, when we need to go out for construction and right-of-away.”

Beltran told the council that he is “very confident” the project will eventually become a reality.

“I am confident that with the new design, cutting this down from almost $300 million to about $100 million that we will get this to the finish line. I would love to say best case scenario open to traffic in about 2032. I think the more realistic timeline is going to be open to traffic in 2034-35 and that’s simply because we have to look at who’s going after funding, what funding we have is a regional as Stanislaus County, not the county itself, but all of the projects that we have going.”

The project costs dropped considerably when plans for realigning the freeway to the east were scrapped for a different less expensive design.

Mayor Javier Lopez, who serves on the StanCOG board, said: “I think that if we continue to push forward with this project and move just a little faster, which only is allowed based on Caltrans, that we can possibly get this done maybe prior to 2035 or at least before my lifetime here at the City Council.”

Beltran said his aim is to have the design 90 percent completed and ready to go for funding in mid- to late 2027.

The plan calls for the Service Road overpass to be replaced with a new northbound freeway onramp north of it.

Hatch Road widening

An already large list of city capital improvement projects had more added last week at the council meeting.

Added was a Hatch Road widening project to the existing SRWA South Transmission Main project under the same project string. Beltran said the widening of Hatch Road will occur from a couple hundred feet east of Mitchell Road to Faith Home Road.

The council also accepted $480,000 in Surface Transportation Block Grant funds for the preliminary engineering phase of the widening and allocating $120,000 in Measure L matching funds for the project as well as hiring Westwood Professional Services, Inc. at no more than $550,000 to engineer, survey, geotechnical design, and construction support services for the Hatch Road Widening and SRWA South Transmission.

“There was an opportunity to get grant funding for this project and we were subsequently awarded $480,000 in STBG funding for the project,” said Beltran.

The city applied for $5 million and missed the award by three points in the rating system “so we will be going after that funding again in the next funding round,” said Beltran.

The widening of Hatch will be tied in with the planned extension of treated Tuolumne River water to the southern section of Ceres.

“We want to combine these projects for really one main reason and that’s economies of scale. If we do them separately, we’re going to need separate geotechnical reports, separate surveying, separate money when we get into construction.”

It also makes sense to install the underground pipe before the grading and pavement goes in.

Beltran said design and environmental work should be completed within the next year. Because the widening of Hatch Road is expected to cost $9 million, the city will need to seek additional grant funding.

“As far as going to construction, this is about the Hatch Road widening portion of it is about a $9 million project. Um, so we will most likely be going after some sort of grant funding.”