Construction near Pioneer’s Park hurts area businesses

Posted By: Bayley Bischof 

bbischof@klkntv.com 

C & L Dairy Sweet has been a west Lincoln staple for nearly 40 years.

It sits on the corner of Coddington and West Van Dorn, attracting ice-cream lovers heading to and from pioneer’s park all summer long.

But the owner says the road closures at that intersection is keeping customers away.

"Because we’re only open 6 months out of the year and last year was really tough on business,” Clarice Loomis, owner said.

The city is turning the intersection into a round-a-bout.

The 1.3 million dollar project is 90% funded by the federal government and 10% by the city. They say it’s needed for safety.

"We had a lot of right-angle collisions where people were pulling up to the stop sign or driving right through and getting hit by cross traffic,” Thomas Shafer with the City of Lincoln said.

It was supposed to be done last fall, Shafer said.

"This has been a two season project,” Shafer said. “It was not intended to be that way in the beginning but we had several things that didn’t go our way and we’re dealing with that now."

The trouble they’ve had has caused a lot of trouble for those local businesses like C & L’s Dairy Sweet and Lee’s Chicken.

"It’s confusing because people call and ask are you open? Is the road open? Which way do we have to go to get there,” Janice Wilcoxen, owner of Lee’s Chicken said. “Its lots of telephone answering and sometimes people just don’t want to deal with it."

Loomis said she really wants to believe when they say it’ll be done next month.

"It was supposed to be done last October and now we’re heading into the second year and this spring they told us it’d be done in June and now they say August, so we just hope that’s it,” Loomis said.

Schafer said there’s going to be meetings held over the next few days to determine an exact timeline of what’s left to do.

The goal is for it to be open by Labor Day.