Work on the Fort Howard Road improvement is 95 percent completed, engineer Tim Baumgartner said.

Baumgartner, Rincon’s engineer and of EMC Engineering in Savannah, said the project should be completed by the end of October.

“It’s about 95 percent done,” he said, adding modifications to the project have been added that will put the completion date at late October.

The project, with an original price tag of $2.66 million, was for the 2.2 miles of the road from Highway 21 to the city limits at Bunyan Kessler Road.

Improvements include resurfacing and widening, with the addition of a turn lane. Traffic counts put the average daily number of vehicles on Fort Howard Road at 11,400.

A sidewalk on the south side also has been installed, and the project also called for piping the existing deep drainage ditches and minimizing the depth of any required drainage swales along the road’s shoulders.

Council members approved, by a 5-1 vote, a change order for three contract additions totaling $56,000. Included in the change order are a guardrail pad, turning lane extensions into Williamsburg subdivision and a lane permitting a turn only to Highway 21 at the Gate gas station.

The turning lane into Williamsburg will be similar to the one into Lost Plantation, Baumgartner said. Council member Scott Morgan asked about other subdivisions along Fort Howard Road that do not have deceleration lanes.

“Are we going to go back and do it for them?” he asked.

Baumgartner said he drove Fort Howard Road, going the posted 35 mph limit, and “traffic backed up on me quickly.”

Baumgartner said they try to manage the number of curb cuts along a road, even with nine subdivisions along Fort Howard Road. The decel lanes were built in accordance with standards and decel lanes are put in if a subdivision reaches a certain number of homes.

The city’s special purpose local option sales tax proceeds and general fund revenues funded the project.