Topeka city leader explains Fairlawn Road construction

TOPEKA (KSNT) – Between much-needed street, stormwater, waterline and sanitary sewer projects, heavy-duty construction is about to start on Fairlawn Road. While everything south of 25th St. will be open to a single lane in each direction, there’s a hard closure between 22nd Pl. and 25th St.

“The road closed this morning, they’ve been doing saw cuts, they’re moving in equipment, it takes a day or two to get mobilized to actually do the removals and you’re going to see a lot of action here starting this week,” Topeka Public Works Director Steve Groen said.

Last week, 27 News talked to nearby residents of the project who expressed their frustrations with the closure. Working for you, we asked the city why they have to implement a hard closure between 22nd and 25th St.

“When you’re getting into large utilities and the deep excavations, the excavations on Fairlawn are going to be 15 feet deep in areas,” Groen said. “It’s just almost impossible to work that deep and have that much of the road torn apart and still be able to maintain traffic. Whenever we can, are goal is going to be to keep the roads open, but sometimes you just can’t avoid closing a road.”

With the first phase including utility work on the sanitary sewer, followed by water main and storm sewer pipe, Groen says it’s a great opportunity to work on the street as well, so the city doesn’t have to backtrack on previous work.

“There’s a lot of instances in the past where, after building a road, water mains would break, sewers would fail, and they would be digging up the road,” Groen said. “The utility department and the public works department have been working very hard to try and coordinate our projects so that when there’s utility work to be done, we’re going to go ahead and get the street fixed, widened, and modernized at the same time and that’s what you’re seeing on Fairlawn.”

Even though the hard closure started a week late, the city does not expect the project to be extended and plans for it to be finished by October 2026.

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