As the McKinnon Street rebuild nears completion, the borough is assessing upcoming projects to satisfy its “one road a year” goal.

On Oct. 27, the assembly held a workshop ahead of its regular meeting to discuss a strategic plan for road work in Wrangell. The Public Works Department has been working to prioritize street projects based on which ones need it the most. Now, the department has a new grading system that will help them do just that.

“Ultimately, our goal here with this is: How do we better identify the project costs and try to plan for these things over time and year in year out?” Public Works Director Tom Wetor told the assembly.

To address the question, Wetor and his team have expanded an existing basic road inventory to account for the infrastructure affecting the overall condition of the road and cost to repair. This includes utilities like water and sewer pipes, underground fiber optic cables and surface condition.

They said they used metrics like when the pipes were installed, the material the pipe was made of and number of recorded water main breaks to determine the urgency of replacement.

“We have roughly about 25 miles of water and sewer mains,” Wetor said at the meeting. “And out of those 25 miles, two miles or two and a half miles, roughly, is HDPE (plastic). Two and a half miles or so is asbestos concrete, and then the remainder is ductile iron.”

For example, Cow Alley behind Cooper’s Corner, which has an asbestos concrete water main that was installed pre-1980s and has had multiple water main breaks in the past year, is at the top of the list for replacement.

The new road inventory also includes a general estimated cost for each component of the repair and the overall project cost. To do so, Wetor said they averaged out the cost per square foot of recent road projects, with St. Michaels Street being on the lower end of the price spectrum and McKinnon Street on the high end.

“Just kind of give people a ballpark idea if we were going to do this to the level that we did St. Michaels or McKinnon Street,” said Wetor. “Not every road is necessarily going to be an apples-to-apples comparison, right?”

He said that Public Works is also using the inventory to assess which projects could be managed in-house, making them more affordable.

The total rebuilds — subsurface, utility lines, new pavement and sidewalks — cost about $1.69 million for McKinnon and $1.25 million for St. Michaels.

Based on the updated inventory, work in 2027 will include Cow Alley — estimated to cost $5.5 million — and work on the sewer line running beneath the stairs between Church Street and Front Street, likely to be done in-house, according to Wetor.

Other projects highlighted included repaving Third Avenue, Cedar Circle which leads up to the state housing apartment buildings, and the parking lot across the street from City Hall.

However, the repaving projects are reliant on whether the Alaska Marine Highway System chooses to bring in an asphalt batch plant to repave the ferry terminal parking lot next year, according to Borough Manager Mason Villarma.

“We’re trying to prioritize areas that we can take advantage of the batch plant because we do not have enough time to get state revolving loan fund money, get the utilities replaced, and then take advantage of the batch plant,” Villarma said.