AUGUSTA — Getting out of Smith Street and onto Western Avenue is safer now that a retaining wall that obstructed sight lines there has been lowered, residents and state officials said.

While some still say the intersection is dangerous and shouldn’t have been configured with inadequate sight lines in the first place, others credit the state Department of Transportation for hearing residents’ concerns and taking action.

“My wife said it’s a huge improvement — she can see now,” said Smith Street resident Ron Lovaglio. “And she’s in a low car.”

Last month, Lovaglio was one of several residents who met with state officials at the intersection to complain they couldn’t see far enough up Western Avenue to the north to pull safely onto Western Avenue. Some residents said they couldn’t see oncoming traffic well enough in either direction to pull onto Western Avenue safely.

State officials on Friday had contractors remove many of the stones from the retaining wall, which runs along Western Avenue between Charlie’s Subaru and Smith Street. The height of the wall, just north of the Smith Street and Western Avenue intersection, was lowered by more than two and a half feet in some places.

However, some residents said they still don’t feel safe pulling out of residential Smith Street onto busy Western Avenue, a major commuting route in and out of Augusta.

“It certainly has helped. I feel safer than I did,” said Smith Street resident Patsy Crockett. “It still is not good. That rise, as you come out of Smith Street by Charlie’s, is still dangerous. They come up over that hill, and they’re coming fast.”

There have been no major car accidents reported at the intersection in recent years, but residents have feared there could be if conditions were not improved.

Crockett, a former Democratic state legislator, said she doesn’t understand why the safety concerns that were obvious to residents weren’t apparent to transportation officials as they designed and built the project. She said doing so when it was designed would have prevented the need to fix the problems now.

“I feel bad that all these changes needed to be made to the design brought forth by the experts,” Crockett said. “Every change, every thing that is dug back up, that’s time, and that is taxpayers’ money. I think when the experts had an opportunity to redesign this, they should have taken advantage of every possible opportunity to make it safer.”

Ralph Turner, who lives on the corner of Western Avenue and Smith Street, said the changes are a big improvement. “Now I’m comfortable I don’t have to nose out too far” to be able to see oncoming traffic and pull out onto Western Avenue, he said.

Seth Wills, an assistant engineer for the state transportation department, said workers took several rows of the roughly six-inch-tall blocks off the wall at the point where it rose the highest, bringing that section down about two-and-a-half feet. Lower parts of the wall only had one or two blocks removed from the top layer. Cap blocks that will top the wall, but which were removed to allow the blocks below them to be removed, had not yet been replaced Monday. Before the project is done, those cap blocks will be replaced, adding about two inches back to the wall height.

Wills said the site has not yet been resurveyed to measure sight lines, but it is clear they are much better than they were before the wall was lowered.

“After we met with residents we acknowledged their concerns and went back to the drawing board to take a look,” Wills said. “They had some legitimate concerns. We came up with a plan to lower the wall and increase visibility. It has certainly improved. We don’t want to put the cap blocks back on until we know we’re done making adjustments.”

Crockett suggested more of the crest of the hill just north of Smith Street should have been lowered, and a utility pole at the intersection of Smith Street and Western Avenue should have been moved because it obstructs views of motorists.

Transportation officials agreed to lower the wall after meeting with residents and agreed to lower it even more than they’d first planned after they met with Lovaglio and Rick Lane, another Smith Street resident, who urged them to make it lower.

Lovaglio said Wills, who exchanged several emails with residents about their concerns, was “very responsive.”

“He came up here, met with residents and listened to what they had to say and worked hard to make the adjustments we thought needed to be made,” Lovaglio said of Wills. “I think it was a good compromise. I was hopeful the logic of what we were trying to say would prevail. They finally got there.”

Wills said a contractor working on the wall when it was first installed put more blocks on the wall than the original design called for, trying to match the slope of the ground at the site. Eight of those blocks were removed Friday as part of the plan to lower the wall.

Wills estimated lowering the wall, including the cost of labor and the use of an excavator, probably cost around $1,000.

Wills, in an email to residents, acknowledged that before the wall was lowered, a survey of the site revealed the sight line to the north up Western Avenue from Smith Street was less than the required 390 feet of sight distance. He said once work is complete there, another survey will take place “to ensure that design requirements for (sight line distance) have either been met or exceeded.”

Wills said the lines now on the pavement through the area are temporary and the final lines will be moved. He said a temporary lane, and lines for it, passed closer to the Smith Street intersection than the final travel lane will be, magnifying residents’ concerns about getting out of Smith Street safely by pushing Western Avenue traffic closer to where Smith Street traffic stops before pulling onto the avenue.

Wills said a camera on a utility pole at the intersection of Smith Street and Western Avenue was also replaced as part of the effort to make the intersection safer. The camera is linked to the traffic lights at the nearby intersection of Western Avenue and Shuman Avenue. When a motorist pulls up to the Smith Street intersection with Western Avenue, the idea is the camera mounted there will signal the traffic lights to stop traffic coming from the north, giving the Smith Street motorist a break in traffic so they can enter Western Avenue.

Turner said getting that system working, which he said doesn’t seem to have been working during construction, should be helpful, though some motorists will likely still run the red light.

The Smith Street intersection is a relatively small part of a major reconstruction of a half-mile section of Western Avenue from Prescott Road to Edison Drive. The $3.8 million project began in September of last year and was initially expected to be done by August. However, delays in the complex project, which has included placing utility wires and new gas and sewer and water lines underground, now mean the final coat of paving won’t occur until next year.

Crews Monday placed a layer of base pavement on the northbound lanes.

Wills expects a milling machine to be on the job later this week, grinding up three inches of old existing pavement on Western Avenue down to Edison Drive.

Wills said they expect to complete a third layer of base pavement on the entire project this year, leaving only the one-and-a-half-inch layer of final pavement to be put down next year, probably in late May.

Keith Edwards — 621-5647

[email protected]

Twitter: @kedwardskj