Engineers outline 2025 road projects

Roughly 40 miles of Carlton County roadway surfaces will receive new pavement in 2025, part of 17 projects costing $12.1 million.

“It’s a big year,” said county engineer JinYeene Neumann, who joined assistant county engineer Rick Norrgard near the end of 2024 to discuss the upcoming projects.

“Last year was a big dollar amount but a lower number of projects, because of the fact that the projects were more entailed,” Neumann said. “[This] year, we’re doing a large number of projects, but they’re paving projects and not as detailed. We don’t have much underground work involved.”

The county will microsurface 20 miles of County Road 61 from the southern county line to Douglas Road outside Carlton. It’ll be the second test at microsurfacing, to go with 2024’s mile-long stretch of Highway 45 in Cloquet. Microsurfacing applies an asphalt mixture to an existing road surface in an effort to preserve the roadway.

“Microsurfacing is fairly new to us,” Neumann said. “It’s a lower-cost, preventative measure we do on the road versus having to repave the whole thing.”

“If a road gets too bad, you can’t do it,” Norrgard added. “You either do this, or repave it in another year.”

The majority of other work is centered on shorter stretches of roads mostly concentrated in the northeast part of the county.

“We have some in Esko, some in Cloquet and some west of Cloquet,” Neumann said. “We try to bundle them together, because you get a better price [on bituminous paving material]. The higher tonnage you have, the better price you get.”

“We didn’t intend for 2025 to get so large,” Norrgard added. “But what happens is we started looking at bundling them together, kind of, ‘While we’re here, this road needs to be done also.’”

There’s also the question of when the county will get back to an area, Norrgard said.

“You might not get back there for 10 years,” he said. “To pave a road by itself is a lot of money and in 10 years there might not be anything left of it, so you better pave it now. [The construction program] sometimes grows that way.”

All told, Carlton County features 489 miles of roadway — 234 miles of paved County State Aid Highways and 72 miles of paved county roads, along with 183 miles of combined gravel roads.

The county averages $10 million worth of road construction annually, with funding coming from the federal and state governments and the half-cent local option sales tax — which amounts to an estimated $2 million annually.

The county works from a five-year program that’s updated every year. The first two years of the program are generally set. But because even one bad winter or spring can wreak havoc on roadways, the remaining years are more tentative.

“The last three years are a moving target,” Norrgard said.

The county uses Minnesota Department of Transportation roadway data — the pavement quality index — to help determine when to intervene and also other factors such as average daily traffic, age of pavement and input from travelers/residents.

“One hard winter, and your roads can change drastically,” Neumann said. “All of a sudden we get a bad freeze/thaw cycle, and we start getting a lot of residents’ complaints. That puts it on our radar.”

Among the projects for 2025 is a short stretch of Chub Lake Road entering the public boat landing and ballfields.

“We inherited it from the township … and it has been needing it for a while,” Norrgard said.

“We received a grant for it — a state park road grant,” Neumann added.

The county has benefitted from 2021’s federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, as part of money the state receives and passes along to the county. But the county has yet to prevail on any grants associated with that President Joe Biden-led infrastructure investment.

“We’ve tried applying for them, but it’s quite an extensive grant process and you’re competing nationally,” Neumann said.

“We’ve got a big culvert in Blackhoof — a $10 to $15 million project — but we’re competing against the Blatnik Bridge, which is a $2 billion project,” Norrgard said.

All of the projects from 2024 — including the Elim Creek bridge project, the 22nd Street reconstruction from Washington to Prospect avenues in Cloquet and the J-turn installation in Carlton — have been fundamentally completed, with only vegetation landscaping and punchlist items remaining.

The fresh start for 2025 is gratifying, the sources said, although there’s a nagging feeling of it never being enough.

“If funding was unlimited, we’d repave Highway 61,” Norrgard said, versus microsurfacing.

“Our main battle, what we’re fighting all the time, is trying to preserve the pavements we have,” Neumann said. “We’re trying to stretch our dollars as far as we can and still get a good product.”

That’s why there are fewer projects that take the roadbed to grade and rebuild the surface from scratch.

“We might be able to do one 3-mile grading stretch in a year, or we might be able to do 15 to 20 pavement stretches,” Norrgard said, referring to the tradeoff made using techniques like mill and overlay aimed at rejuvenating existing pavement. “You affect more roads and help more people by putting them in better condition as opposed to, ‘Do we really need to grade this but can’t afford it.’”

“You work with the money you have,” Neumann said.

Carlton County’s 2025 road projects

1. County Road 109, Chub Lake Road. Full-depth reclamation/pave. 0.63 miles.

2. CR 113 Brookston Road, County State Aid Highway 7 to county line. Pave. Approximately 3 miles.

3. CR 114 Lund Road, Twin Lakes to Brookston roads. Full-depth reclamation/pave. Approx. 2.3 miles.

4. CR 114 Reservation Road, CSAH 7 to south of Lockling. Mill and fill. Approx. 0.85 miles.

5. CR 116 Stark Road, Truck Highway 33 to Crosby Road. Full-depth reclamation/pave. Approx. 1.5 miles.

6. CR 117 Freeman Road, Truck Highway 33 to Stark Road. Mill/full-depth reclamation/pave. Approx. 1.1 miles.

7. CR 118 Prevost Road. Mill/full-depth reclamation/pave. 2 miles.

8. CR 119 Crosby Road, Stark to St. Louis River roads. Mill and fill. Approx. 1 mile.

9. CR 152 Himango Road. Mill/full-depth reclamation/pave. Approx. 2 miles.

10. CSAH 25 Mission Road, Trunk Highway 210 to CSAH 7. Full-depth reclamation/pave and trail construction from Hwy. 210 to Maple Drive. 4 miles.*

11. CR 103. Replace culvert 3,700 feet north of CSAH 8.

12. CR 103. Replace culvert 1,550 feet south of Mihnke Road.

13. CSAH 61. South County Line to Douglas roads. Microsurface. 20 miles.

14. City of Cromwell multiuse trail. Approx. 0.5 miles.

15. CR 107 Central Hall Road. Revert. Approx. 3,000 feet to gravel.

16. CR 131. Revert. Approx. 1,100 feet to gravel.

17. CSAH 24 Halvorson Road. Micro surface. Approx. 1 mile.

*Mission Road work may be moved to 2026, depending on right of way and environmental concerns being negotiated with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.