GUILDERLAND — Work for the new roundabout at Carman Road and Lydius Street was scheduled to begin this week. 

The work, described by Supervisor Peter Barber during the March 15 town board meeting as “mostly grub work” to get “ready for more heavy duty construction,” was due to start on Tuesday. 

Sometime around April 4, the abandoned Nedco Pharmacy is due to be demolished, the supervisor said, then on either April 11 or 18, the real work is set to begin. What Barber called “the actual dirty work of what do you do about roads and how do you keep traffic going.”

Initially, a roundabout in Rotterdam was to be installed first, but, for logistical reasons, the Guilderland roundabout work is likely to be built first, Barber said. 

“There’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” Barber said, so it’s likely that the work will take up the entire construction season, meaning it will last until October or November. 

Barber said there’s a plan in place to keep traffic moving at all times with the exception of a few early morning shutdowns. The work includes the installation of a sidewalk from the new roundabout down Carman Road round to Pine Bush Elementary School.

The project has an estimated cost of $3.25 million. 

Sidewalks 

The board approved a $326,235 contract with Peter Luizzi & Brothers Contracting for a sidewalk on West Old State Road between Carman Road and Lynwood Elementary School. 

Barber noted Luizzi was the only contractor of seven who’d picked up a project packet to submit a bid, and that it came in $80,000 over the original estimate. 

The supervisor said the town was looking for the state’s transportation department to increase its funding for the project, “and we expect to get a positive response to that.” But, if that’s not the case, “we’re going to have to come back and figure out how we’re going to pay for the difference,” Barber said. 

Barber expressed concern because an upcoming sidewalk project set to go out to bid has an estimated cost of $800,000, and the state’s transportation department “already indicated they’re having some issues in other parts of the state with some of these sidewalks.”

He referred to West Old State Road overage and said if the $800,000 saw a 20-percent increase in cost, “you’re getting close to a million dollars.” Barber said, “Hopefully things will quiet down, but we’re going to proceed and see what happens …. I really hope we get some bids for that because, if we start seeing numbers over a million dollars, we’ve got a problem.”