On Time, Under Budget, Potter & Ellis Intersection Officially Opens

Before a small crowd at MacDonald Park, a tiny triangle of land at the intersection of Ellis and Potter Streets, Haddonfield Mayor Tish Colombi, Camden County Freeholder Director Louis Capelli, Jr., and Freeholder Ian Leonard, liaison to the Camden County Department of Public Works, celebrated recently completed improvements to the main southern entrance to the borough.

Completed a month ahead of schedule and 8% under budget, the project was a win-win-win in terms of funding, public safety improvement, and logistics.

“This was a notoriously high accident area for years,” said Leonard, who touted the new safety features of the reconfigured county-road intersection: a new, timed traffic signal, repaved intersection approaches, new turning lanes, ADA-compliant curbing, and new stormwater grates.

Leonard also pointed out that the $1 million in borough contributions towards the $2.3 million construction costs helped get the project done.

“We’re limited in the amount of funding we get from the state of New Jersey,” he said. “Sometimes a little extra funding with the engineering costs makes our job easier.”

“This partnership with the county is certainly the way partnerships should be done when county roads go through a town,” said Colombi.

Another benefit to the new outlay of the intersection, said Colombi, is that its lane width prohibits use of Potter Street for heavy trucking, instead diverting such traffic down Ellis and towards the center of town.

“This makes Potter a no-trucking street,” said Colombi. “It protects this historic street from traffic and has a very positive effect on this entrance into town.”

Aging highway and byway infrastructure is a nationwide priority, Leonard said, and funds for its improvement have been designated from President Obama’s federal stimulus package. In South Jersey, that involves tackling things like the State Street Bridge in Camden and similar projects in Winslow and Bellmawr.

“We have an aggressive schedule with road projects,” Leonard said. “That’s something we target year after year.”

Haddonfield will focus on road improvements on Winding Way and Washington Avenues in 2012 as part of its road upkeep program, for which $1 million in municipal funds and $150,000 in state monies are dedicated annually.

Colombi also lauded the diligence of Asphalt Paving Systems, the contractors hired to bring the project to completion, in aggressively exceeding the project deadlines.

“[This project] had elements that could go wrong—handicap access, beautification, fencing—and they were always doing something,” she said.