DES MOINES, Iowa — It has been five years since work started on the extensive reconstruction project taken on by the city for Fleur Drive.

The roadway serves as a main artery, connecting the airport to downtown Des Moines. The project in total cost $23 million, but this final phase is only $700,000 of that. It is repaving work that is taking place on Fleur right by Des Moines Water Works Park and Grays Lake.

“Over the last five years the city of Des Moines has been working to improve about a four-mile stretch of Fleur Drive,” said Steven Naber, City Engineer with the City of Des Moines. “…so today we started the final phase…which involves resurfacing of Fleur Drive from George Flagg Parkway up to Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway.”

The work is strictly resurfacing only, with crews milling down three and a half inches of roadway, which will allow them to patch and repair panels of concrete. Currently, both lanes of traffic on Fleur Drive are reduced to one lane, with the milling of the outside lanes already under way.

Drivers can expect that one lane traffic to cause delays consistently over the next several months, but work is not expected to take that long.

“We would anticipate that this will be all done by mid-October of this year. And so it’s not the same work that we all experienced between essentially George Flagg Parkway and McKinley, where we had to completely reconstruct the pavement all the way own to the dirt. And then we had a whole bunch of utility work with new water mains, storm sewers,” said Naber.

If the weather stays dry, there is some anticipation from the city that work could be completed sooner than the middle of October. Once the work on the outside lanes are done, work will shift to the inside lanes. Towards the end of the project, there will be a couple of overnight closures to Fleur Drive, where crews will complete the final pass of pavement.

Both Gray’s Lake Park and Des Moines Water Works Park will be open during normal operating hours, just expect to wait in traffic if you are heading near the area.