The city of St. Cloud has acquired almost all of the parcels needed for the New Nolte Road expansion, which will extend the east-west street from Canoe Creek Road to Hickory Tree Road on the east side of St. Cloud.

The project, currently estimated to cost $42 million, is one of the largest road projects the city has undertaken. New Nolte will not only be expanded to a four-lane road, but also extended to run as a parallel route to U.S. Highway 192, taking some of the traffic off the major highway. City officials originally wanted the county to take on the road project, but county officials said they would not be able to afford it.

The 88 acres needed for the project, owned by 52 original owners, will cost the city about $14 million, along with the fees and costs associated with acquiring the property.

Almost $11 million of that has already been spent. The council met in a closed session Thursday to discuss four pending settlement proposals and ongoing litigation with seven other owners.

“The only ones that remain out there are the seven that originally challenged the order of taking hearings,” Bart Valdez, the attorney representing the city on the issue, told the council last week. “If the city is successful in that, then the city would have acquired all of the dirt that it will need for the project.”

A hearing with the seven property owners still disputing the taking of their combined 18 parcels is scheduled for March 2. Those owners, which include relatives of Councilman Jarom Fertic, filed six legal objections to the taking, City Attorney Dan Mantzaris said. They argued that the city couldn’t condemn property outside its municipal boundaries and that both the county and city’s charters did not allow for that type of construction project, among other issues.

In a hearing in July, a judge ruled in favor of the city in five of the six objections. The prevailing objection involved a technical issue relating to the identification and description of certain properties, Mantzaris said. The city has since corrected that issue. However, the paperwork for a motion for rehearing was filed late.

“Our office made a mistake in calendaring the time for filing a motion for rehearing, and because of that, the court denied the motion,” Mantzaris told the council in early December.

Mantzaris’ explanation of the mistake on Dec. 3 led to a council discussion about whether the city should hire an attorney full-time, though the council members eventually decided that it would be too expensive to do so.

The city’s attorneys filed new eminent domain cases in late December. Valdez said during the council meeting on March 21 that the city made “significant victories” on objections brought up in the previous land acquisition hearings for the New Nolte project, issues that likely would not hold weight in the upcoming hearing.

“We’re very confident that we’re going to be able to go through this process and get properties at the hearing in March, or if not, very shortly thereafter,” Valdez said.

City staff said the delay in land acquisition would not affect the timeline for the road construction, for which the city has slated about $26.5 million. Construction should take about 18 months and, if all the land is acquired by March as planned, should begin by the fourth quarter of 2010, around October, Public Services Administrator Todd Swingle said last week.

Last week, council members also debated whether the construction project should be contracted in a traditional project bid method, whereas all costs are defined by competitive bid process, or use a construction manager-at-risk. In the latter method, the construction manager-at-risk hired by the city would guarantee a final maximum price for the entire project and then select subcontractors.

Swingle said that he couldn’t recommend one method over the other when it came to price, though Osceola County commissioners claimed to have saved a lot of money using a construction manager-at-risk for the Narcoossee Road project. At the council members’ request, Swingle said he could prepare, at an upcoming council meeting, more specific savings comparisons between the two methods using Narcoossee Road, the only comparable construction project in scope and size, as a point of comparison.

City staff did say that the construction manager-at-risk method tended to allow more local involvement, as it is easier for the smaller subcontractors to be awarded different pieces of the project.