Work on state Highway 47 between County Road VV in Keshena and the Langlade County line is expected to keep the road closed to most traffic until mid-August, at which point attention will be diverted to state Highway 55, according to a report from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation presented at a public information meeting June 30 at the Wolf River Development Company.
Highway 47 has been closed to all but emergency vehicles or reduced to a single lane since construction started, and it will remain closed to traffic traveling through the reservation until next month, but local traffic will be allowed to proceed, albeit with some delays. Traffic will be traveling on gravel surfaces for portions of the project, and flaggers are not going to be present.
Trevor Kalkofen, DOT project manager, said that it’s anticipated that a second work crew would be coming in due to things falling behind schedule. Work will proceed from south to north, he said. Once the culverts are upgraded, asphalt will be placed on them.
“Other than that, it’s pretty much status quo for the next few weeks, we’ll call it for now, putting up walls and then putting asphalt over them,” Kalkofen said.
Once culvert work has been completed on Highway 47 in August, work will begin on Highway 55, specifically culvert replacement, patching and guardrail work, allowing for those tasks to be finished this year.
DOT will begin pavement resurfacing this fall on Highway 47 between Keshena and Neopit, and paving will continue north of Neopit as long as warm weather allows. The rest of the work on Highway 47 will resume in spring 2027, along with the pavement work on Highway 55. During paving work, roads will be reduced to one lane with flaggers directing traffic.
Both highways are expected to be fully reopened in mid-summer 2027.
Jim Peck, project leader for the Highway 47-55 project, said that people are becoming more aware of the project and detouring when necessary. The official detour requires motorists to take state Highway 29, which is itself under construction and then U.S. Highway 45 into Langlade County, and while Peck said the state usually can’t officially detour on roads that aren’t maintained by the state, he said locals on the reservation are figuring out their own detours to get to where they need to go.
However, out-of-town traffic is a different matter, he said.
“The out-of-town people are trying to map through Google and trying to force their way through,” Peck said, noting that efforts are being made to get the closures onto digital mapping apps.
A question was raised about the work being done on state Highway 22 in Shawano County and how the detour utilizes County Road BE. Peck said that to do that, the state has to come to an agreement with counties or municipalities in the event that the added traffic damages their roads, and those agreements usually have to happen before road projects begin.
lpulaski@newmedia-wi.com
