CLARKSVILLE — A practical approach to bidding out street projects has saved the town of Clarksville more than $60,000 on road projects.

With 12 different paving projects on his plate, Clarksville Street Commissioner Brad Cummings realized that by combining the projects where streets intersected, he was able to meet the requirements for volume discounts from contractors. Instead of asking for contractors to bid 12 projects, he invited bidding on just five.

“For instance, one of the contractors bid $118 per laid ton if we purchased up to 50 tons, which some of these roads will only be 50 tons of concrete put on them,” Cummings said. “But if you buy over 500 tons, the price per ton goes from $118 to $52.50. So by us taking the time to bundle these up into projects, we were able to get that ultimate low price by being over 500 tons per job.”

The paving and striping projects, which were approved by the Clarksville Town Council on Monday, total about $300,000.

“Brad has gone in and applied a very business-oriented kind of approach to things,” council President John Gilkey said. “He has the skill set to be able to identify problem areas, but with solutions that are going to resolve issues. He looks at the expenditures within his department, and kind find ways to trim those expenditures back to minimize the costs to the taxpayers. And overall, he’s done a fantastic job of that.”

Four of the five projects are repaving in nature. The first project will see sections of Brooks and Randolph Avenues repaved by Mac Construction for $80,001. Three separate projects were awarded to Gohmann Asphalt & Construction. Gohmann won a project covering Bailey and Francis Avenues for $44,915, another for Marlowe, Tennyson and Byron Drives for $77,873, and a third covering two sections of Woodstock Drive and Giltner Lane for $76,967.

The final job, a striping job on Veterans Parkway, was awarded to TSI for $13,504.

In addition to saving on tonnage, the town is also cutting down on move-in fees (fees for moving equipment and materials to and from work sites) by keeping the projects in proximity to one another.

“Where you would have paid that per road, by us bundling them in and having three or four roads per project, we were able to have just one move-in instead of three or four move-ins,” Cummings explained.

The projects are all slated to be completed by the end of the year. The restriping on Veterans Parkway should be completed by Oct. 15 to avoid the rush of holiday traffic. Cummings doesn’t expect any of the projects to take more than three days or so to complete, and he doesn’t foresee any road closures.

The cost savings means that the street department might be able to essentially check a few other projects off its wish list by the end of the year for free, or it could mean another full-time employee in the office. Gilkey said Cummings could use another full-timer.

“That $60,000 more than covers that salary, and as a result, we can do a much better job within the street department because of having the employees we need,” Gilkey said. “And we don’t to go out and get additional appropriations to get those funds in.”