DILLER, Neb. - Good news for Southeast Nebraska citizens who are anxious to see improvements to a rough stretch of road between Jefferson and Gage Counties: a tentative timeframe for road repair has been set after statewide officials dropped in to see the road firsthand this week.  

Jefferson County personnel welcomed officials and scientists from Olsson and the Nebraska Department of Transportation to Diller on Wednesday, bringing together many critical pieces of the puzzle that are responsible for approving plans to repair parts of Southeast Nebraska’s PWF Road.  

Part of the road was previously repaved, and the part that’s left, near the Jefferson and Gage County lines, will cost approximately $13 million in total to repair and replace. That project is currently on track to be put out for bids by December 2026, with construction to begin in Spring 2027 and lasting two construction seasons – so an expected completion by the end of Summer 2028. 

“If we’re on track we can move it up, if we’re not, then we’d just go ahead with the December start,” said Jenna Habegger, NDOT’s project manager. “We typically leave a year in the schedule for right-of-way [determinations], but if the town says we’re not anticipating any issues that might go faster than a year. 

Among those with a seat at the Diller table Wednesday were the Jefferson County contingent including Tim Farmer of Speece Lewis, the county’s contracted lead engineer, as well as County Commissioner Mark Schoenrock and assistant highway superintendent Terry Blas.  

“Everyone knows my interest in all of this – my interest is to make it happen as quickly as we can so we can get out for bids and get the road built,” Schoenrock said. “I’m confident that everyone here is sharing that same focus so we can get the road done as quickly as we can.” 

Alongside Habegger, coming to Diller from Lincoln and Omaha were the team from NDOT and a crew of environmental scientists from NDOT and Olsson, who are responsible for assessing potential threats to wildlife, native ecosystems and the animals and people who live near the project area. That procedure is part of the reason it’s taken a while for any actual construction to begin, but it’s a critical step of the process with both environmental and legal ramifications. 

“The goal is, on a broad scale, to minimize impacts on wetlands, and if we do impact them, compensate by creating wetlands somewhere else,” said Heidi Hillhouse, a wetland biologist with NDOT. “We map where the channels are and where the wetlands are so we can overlay the construction plans on top of them and figure out where the impacts are going to be and figure out if we need to worry about things like mitigating the impact.” 

Some impact to native ecosystems is just par for the course in a construction project, Hillhouse said, but once a certain impact threshold is crossed, that’s when mitigation and compensation processes need to take place. And it’s a low threshold, as well: a tenth of an acre for wetlands, and three-hundredths of an acre for channels.  

“If you exceed those levels, then you have to mitigate for it,” Hillhouse explained. 

Most of the eight officials who conducted Wednesday’s site visit have navigated the PWF Road many times, but for some it was their first time seeing the condition of the road, and the condition of the environment surrounding it.  

“Each person plays an important part to play in the process – there are a lot of moving parts,” Schoenrock said. “There’s all kinds of different things you have to do before you can start. To have everybody out here to actually look at the road, it’s very important.” 

This site visit marks an important stage of the PWF project’s process, a timeline that stretches back to late 2023 when Schoenrock and Jefferson County, working with Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer and Representative Adrian Smith, first secured $8.5 million in congressionally directed spending which will now cover most of the PWF’s price tag, which carries an estimated cost between $13 and $14 million all told.  

That $8.5 million came from the federal government, which required extra legwork for Habegger and the folks at NDOT to process. Speaking of NDOT, Jefferson County was also awarded $500,000 in state funding through their bridge match program last year, which will go towards funding a full replacement of a bridge near the Gage County line.  

Farmer estimated Wednesday that part of the project will run around $1.2 million, so nearly half of it will be covered by that state grant. And, critically, part of Wednesday’s determination was that even though the bridge is very much part of the PWF Road, construction on the bridge could start sooner than the full road repair will. 

“If the county bridge is ready to go, and this one [the main project] is not quite ready, we can start on that one. The projects can run concurrently,” Habegger said. 

So that’s $8.5 million in federal dollars plus $500,000 in state grants to equal $9 million, funding more than half of a project Farmer estimated will cost closer to $13 million than 14. So where would the other (approximately) $4 million come from? Schoenrock said the next step would be for he and his fellow Jefferson County board members to approve a county bond which would spread that $4 million hit over a couple of decades rather than trying to eat all of the cost at once.  

“We’ll be able to spread it out over 20 to 30 years so the amount per year out of our county budget won’t be that much,” Schoenrock explained. “Well, it’s still a lot of money, but we can afford it – whereas we’d never be able to afford 14 million in one go in our little rural county budget, but now we can. With that bond that 8.5 million is now within the realm of reality.” 

Concrete pouring and road paving might not begin for more than a year still, but after this site visit and thanks to a lot of work done behind the scenes by many people for a long time, real visible progress on the PWF Road is now within the realm of reality for Southeast Nebraska citizens as well.