VALLEY — Recent rainy weather has slowed down the pace of work this summer, but there’s still plenty of time to get caught up.

“The rain and the wet conditions have slowed us down for the past 15 or 16 days,” Valley Mayor Leonard Riley told The Valley Times-News. “We’re way behind on grass cutting. We may not get caught up till September.”

The soggy conditions have impacted the site preparation work going on at the Scannell Properties site in the Valley Industrial Park, where a new distribution center for WestRock is going to be built.

Because of the rain, not much work has been done there over the past two-and-a-half weeks. With some dry weather, that can get caught up over the summer. That phase of the work is on a schedule to be finished in early 2019.

The city is planning on a very busy summer of road paving. Around seven miles of city streets will get resurfaced. The biggest project is to resurface River Road from Trammell Block in Fairfax all the way to McGinty’s Crossing and then along California Road to School Street.

“We will be doing more paving this year than normal,” Mayor Riley said. “The biggest single project is River Road in Fairfax to School Street in River View,” Riley said. “We’ll also be paving a big section of 55th Street and over half of Boulevard in Shawmut. We’ll also be doing 23rd Street and Cusseta Road.”

The mayor is hoping the citizens are understanding of the slow down.

“You can’t get much done when the ground is wet,” he said. “We’ll have to have some dry weather to get caught up on the grass cutting. We can’t have tractors getting mired up with the soggy conditions.”