Palm Coast Parkway and Side Streets to Undergo $6.6 Million Nighttime Resurfacing Over 4 Months

Palm Coast Parkway will turn into a work zone around May as crews will pave the entire 5.2-mile length of the road from the Hammock Dunes Bridge to U.S. 1 over a 120-day period in a $6.6 million project. All the work will be done at night to minimize disruption to drivers. 

The Palm Coast City Council approved the project last week as part of a series of road improvements that also include repaving side streets between the parkway’s eastbound and westbound lanes and improving turn lanes. The roads will be milled, their bases repaired where necessary. The milling will go down 1.5 inches, and the asphalt layer will be 1.5 inches. “Arterial roadway work may include areas of base repair, utilizing deep milling up to 8 inches and replacement of base material with asphalt,” the contract states.

“I feel like there’s worse areas in Palm Coast that could use this work rather than some of what’s highlighted here,” City Council member Theresa Pontieri said. She was also concerned about using up almost all the money in the city’s street fund for this year. She was not alone: Palm Coast Parkway doesn’t strike the frequent motorist as a particularly poor road, the way, for example, Royal Palms Parkway was before it was resurfaced in 2024. 

“You want to try to address them before they fail,” Traffic Engineer Scott Kehoe said. “The scans did show that by the end of next year, the whole road would have needed to be done anyway.” The project is separate from an ongoing, citywide scan of all streets. But Palm Coast Parkway was previously scanned and showed needed, preemptive work. “I know when you look at it, you drive, you say, Oh, this looks good,” particularly in comparison with neighborhood streets, Kehoe said. “We can’t lose the main roads, the main arterials.”

Carl Cote, the city’s director of stormwater and engineering, said. The goal is to maintain an average of 78 for arterial roads like the parkway. “We’re probably in the low 70s average across Palm Coast Parkway. So we’re getting to that critical point,” he said. “Could you delay it one year? Possibly.” But it could make the fix more expensive. In 2022, the average rating for the Parkway was 78 to 80. 

Kehoe said it would not be useful to pave the road in sections. “So you try to not make the road look like a quilt,” he said. “You want to have it paved from one side to the other. Unfortunately, you’ve got to pave over some good areas when you mill it out. I understand that. But you don’t want to try to save something that’s good only to make a lesser, inferior type of a product by introducing joints all over the road.” 

The parkway may also need to have parts of its subbase rebuilt. 

The streets between the westbound and eastbound lanes of Palm Coast Parkway to be milled and repaved include Bridgehaven Drive, Corporate Drive, Pinecone Drive, Diandra Taxiway, Harbor

Center Way, Florida Park Drive, Clubhouse Drive, Colbert Lane, and Fairways Circle. Curbs will also be reconstructed. Clubhouse Drive will be re-striped. Kehoe also recommended against removing some of those streets for budgetary reasons. Leaving them out and returning in a future year, “it’s going to be a big problem to get back there to do one street,” he said. “So now you’re going to pay double triple just to get that one street.” Sharply questioned about the need to repave all the side roads, Kehoe put up a strong front to keep them in the plan. It was a close call. 

Notably, however, the section of Belle Terre Parkway between the two Palm Coast Parkway directions was left out of the repaving program, to save money and redirect that money to other roads, Cote said. 

The contract was awarded to Halifax Paving. The contractor will be responsible for striping. The project is financed with gas-tax revenue and state-revenue sharing drawn from the state’s sales tax. 

“The amount of traffic that falls on these roads specifically is vast,” Council member Ty Miller said. “It supports all of our business that happens within the city. So we can’t afford to not support this.” Mayor Mike Norris blamed ITT, the founder and original builder of Palm Coast, for the poor shape of the road, though the Parkway was rebuilt and enlarged long after ITT quit the city. Miller was not interested in laying blame, just in getting the job done. 

The council approved the contract unanimously. The 120-day contract period will be carried out between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m. Residents should expect temporary lane closures, reduced speeds, and traffic delays during construction. Access to homes and businesses will be maintained, and the city will provide advance notice as work progresses through each area.

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