By DAVID CLOUSTON

Salina Journal

An old approach to landscaping the recently built North Ohio Street railroad overpass would have been green, conservative -- nay, a little dull, even -- and a heck of a lot more labor-intensive.

The traditional route meant planting the slopes of the overpass with water-sucking fescue grass and mowing once a week.

"The idea here is only to mow it once a year," landscape architect Craig Rhodes said of the landscape design being employed on the overpass. It features prairie grasses, shrubs and trees that are weather-tolerant and native to Kansas.

Workers in the past month have begun finishing planting the landscaping, which together with a drip irrigation system, cost a total of $257,178, said Mike Fraser, the city's director of public works. The workers also are doing supplemental watering to get the plantings well-established.

When mature, the area should look like a native forest to travelers crossing the bridge, said Rhodes, of the landscape design firm Patti Banks Associates in Kansas City, Mo., which was hired to create the design.

Patti Banks designs mostly commercial and public installations along highways and streets, parks, and business campuses.

"This is a pretty typical installation. The difference is how native we've gone the last couple of years," Rhodes said.

To start with, the company hired to install the plantings -- RFB Construction of Pittsburg -- brought in truckloads of compost and topsoil to make fertile beds.

Lot of different trees

They planted 64 trees, including redbuds, dogwoods, oaks, sycamores and eastern red cedars. The shrubs planted include red chokeberry; yucca; wildflowers that include black-eyed Susans; sumac; sedum; maidengrass; and 11,000 daffodils.

Every tree and plant is watered at the root zone with a drip irrigation system that feeds off a city water line running along Ohio Street.

The drip-line emitters don't take as much water pressure to operate, so there's less piping necessary because you can put more emitters on each irrigation line.

"We thought it would be worth the effort to put drip emitters on each tree, We can shut those off once (the trees) are established," Rhodes said.

The grass and shrub mix should get no more than 2 to 3 feet high.

"We put lots of forbes in there -- wildflowers. It keeps the height down low. So it doesn't begin to look like a tall, unmaintained mess," he said. "That's the thing about prairie, you want to control what it looks like."

A light-out operation

While the landscaping portion of the $20.2 million overpass is being installed, engineers and city officials are continuing to deal with two other problems concerning the project: The cracking of the concrete on the west retaining wall and the slanted decorative poles holding LED bulbs lining both sides of the road.

Since April 2007, when the overpass opened to traffic, local officials have found that the poles' vibration from the wind is causing the bulbs to unscrew from their sockets and not light.

City workers are teaming with Wilson & Co., the engineering firm on the bridge project, to come up with a solution for holding the bulbs in place.

"We're looking at tape, a spring device of sorts, and the third is a locking washer of sorts," Fraser said. "We'll evaluate that and see which ones really do work best."

Thirteen areas of severe concrete cracking, leading to the removal of the fence on top of the west retaining wall, remain to be repaired. Discussions with officials from the Kansas Department of Transportation and King Construction, the general contractor for the project, are ongoing about the estimated cost and who will be paying for what aspects of the work, Fraser said.

As to when those issues will be resolved, Fraser said "I really don't know at this time. We are looking to move the discussion to a point of resolution."

n Reporter David Clouston can be reached at 822-1403 or by e-mail at dclouston@salina.com.