"We're just mad."
That's Jack Brown, standing in his yard off Odessa Street this spring, describing what it's like to live one block from the stretch of Woodlawn Boulevard that Bel Aire has now torn up twice in seven years. Brown has lived there 43 years. He uses an electric wheelchair, has survived two heart attacks, and until recently could count on Fire Station 37 reaching him in about a minute. He wasn't venting about a pothole. He was describing a road that failed once already and is now being rebuilt from the ground up, on a timeline that has already slipped.
What makes this year confusing for anyone driving Woodlawn regularly is that Brown's stretch isn't the only one under some form of construction. A few blocks south, a completely different segment of the same street got repaved this summer for a completely different reason. Same road name, same general corridor, two unrelated projects running on two unrelated clocks. If you've heard a neighbor complain about "the Woodlawn thing" and it didn't quite match what you saw driving through, that's why.
The Segment That Sank
The section between 37th Street and 45th Street North has the longer, harder story. Planning for its original reconstruction dates back to the 2010s, with Wichita Area Metropolitan Planning Organization funding approved and construction dollars available by 2021. MKEC Engineering designed the road, Pearson Construction built it, and Garver handled inspections.
By the summer of 2023, that build was nearly finished when the city discovered portions of the new pavement north of 37th Street were cracking and sinking. The cause traced back to Wellington Shale, a soil layer common across Kansas and Oklahoma that typically sits well below the surface. Here it didn't. When groundwater saturates it, the shale turns soft and sponge-like, and whatever sits on top of it settles. The city later filed suit against the engineering, construction, and inspection firms involved, along with the bonding company, seeking to recover the cost of doing the work over. That legal process, combined with more than eighteen months of geotechnical study to confirm exactly what had gone wrong, is most of why the road sat half-finished for close to three years. As Mayor Jim Benage put it when the second rebuild was announced, the city's priority was identifying the true cause before attempting another fix.
Round Two, and the Setback Nobody Predicted
Work on the corrective rebuild began April 20, 2026, split into four phases, with a summer 2027 target for the whole stretch. Phase one covered the shortest segment, Quail Ridge Street to Rodeo Street, and was projected to take about two months.
It didn't. Crews excavating that section hit soft subgrade soil more extensive than the pre-construction testing had predicted, and work paused in early May while engineers worked out a fix. The solution, chemically stabilizing the ground with a calcium oxide treatment and geogrid, went before the Bel Aire City Council on June 16, which approved a change order not to exceed $712,024. That figure was written to cover not just phase one's repair but the same fix if crews hit the same problem in phases two or three. Work resumed July 6, and final paving between Quail Ridge and Rodeo wrapped in mid-to-late August, roughly four months after a project originally budgeted at two.
Phase two started right behind it on August 24, covering Rodeo Street to Woodlawn Court and closing off Perryton and Odessa access in the process. That's Brown's stretch. The city's current estimate puts this phase at about six months, which would put reopening somewhere around late February 2027. Sedgwick County Fire District 1 has said Station 37 will use its back entrance during the closure, a route it already relies on for some calls, but for a resident who depends on fast response times, a longer detour is a longer detour regardless of which door the truck uses.
Phases three and four are still ahead. Phase three, Woodlawn Court to 45th Street, is expected to run another six months and will close Danbury and 44th Street access along the way. Phase four, Quail Ridge to 37th Street, is the only one that won't require full closures. City documents describe it as intermittent lane closures with flaggers, estimated at about two months.
Add those windows together and they run past the city's own summer 2027 target, especially since phase one already doubled its estimate once. The date is worth treating as a goal rather than a guarantee.
A Different Stretch, a Different Reason
South of that, between 45th and 53rd Streets, Woodlawn had a much simpler year. That segment was resurfaced this summer as part of the city's routine 2026 Street Maintenance Project, a standard mill-and-overlay job with no shale problem and no lawsuit behind it. Kansas Paving wrapped that stretch by early July before moving crews over to Rock Road between the same cross streets. Cillessen & Sons followed with pavement marking on Woodlawn, then Rock Road, then Webb Road between 45th Street and K-254 through late July and early August.
None of that work connects to the reconstruction happening a few blocks north. It's the kind of repaving Bel Aire does most years, just compressed into the same season as a much larger project with the same street name, which is exactly the kind of overlap that makes one neighborhood's road situation sound worse, or more singular, than it actually is.
Two more changes landed in the same stretch of summer without being tied to either project. The intersection at 53rd Street and Woodlawn converted to a four-way stop on August 10, and 53rd Street and Oliver got the same treatment on August 31, both framed by the city as straightforward safety improvements rather than construction fallout.
What This Means If Your Route Runs Through Here
If your regular drive crosses Woodlawn between 37th and 45th, plan on detours through at least late February 2027, with another closure likely to follow on the next segment north once phase two wraps. Perryton traffic is routed south during phase two, Woodlawn Court traffic north, and the same detour logic will apply to Danbury and 44th Street once phase three begins.
If your route runs through 53rd and Woodlawn, or 53rd and Oliver, the four-way stops are already in place and aren't going anywhere. If you're south of 45th, the repaving there is done, and there's no more disruption scheduled on that piece for the rest of the year.
Living next to infrastructure that's mid-repair isn't a mark against a place. Every growing corridor in the Wichita area goes through a stretch like this, and Bel Aire's is simply better documented than most, right down to the soil report that explains why. Knowing which project you're actually looking at, and which clock it's running on, is the difference between bracing for a headache that's almost over and one that's just getting started.
If you're trying to figure out how any of this touches a specific street or a specific commute in Bel Aire, Pam & Ashley Hesse track this corridor block by block and are glad to walk through what it means for your particular stretch of road.
