Large-scale maintenance on that roadway is overdue: “frost boils” -- spots where the push and pull of winter cold and spring warmth cause pavement to heave upward, particularly when the base of the road is failing -- appeared this spring, making driving treacherous. The city is on the verge of paying $12,750 to RJ Zavoral and Sons Inc. to remove the boils and upgrade the roadway materials underneath them, but it’s a temporary repair that aims to make the road safe for snowplows this winter and act as a foundation for a longer-lasting repairs next summer. Council members are set to formally consider that plan at their meeting this week.
But a city policy presents a hurdle for the kind of wholesale replacement that’s reportedly needed on that stretch of 20th.
Rebuilding it and three blocks of Fifth Avenue Northwest, which is also in need of work, would cost about $1.9 million, according to East Grand Forks staff, and city policy stipulates that nearby property owners pay for of it via special assessments, which are charges a city can make to residents to help pay for a public project.
That puts neighbors and city officials in a bind: The city hasn’t allocated enough money to buy a brand-new new street there, and the residents around it don’t want to spend tens of thousands of dollars apiece to pay for it themselves, either.
Joe Kotaska, who’s lived on 20th Street for 19 years, said he got a letter from the city explaining that he’d be on the hook for $34,000, spread over several years.
“I did not really approve of the numbers,” said Kotaska, noting the street is the worst he’s lived on in a long time.
City workers reduced traffic along it to a single lane and put orange and white markers next to the protruding boil. Most residents along 20th and Fifth would have been asked to pay from $12,000 to nearly $50,000, but some would have been asked to pay as much as $60,000, according to City Administrator David Murphy.
The road sits on top of several different kinds of soil, and that soil gets particularly wet, even for a floodplain such as the one on which the Grand Cities sit. That makes the ground underneath the roadway relatively unstable, which means more wear and tear.
Other streets get medium-term maintenance about every seven to 10 years, but the city has foregone that type of work on 20th for years and years because engineers contend that the road needs to be rebuilt from scratch.
“This is the worst street in town as far as being degraded,” Stordahl said.
Some roadways near the industrial park on the south end of town are also due to be replaced, but they’re in financially different circumstances because the city could point federal money at that work.
In the short-term, the city has spent about $60,000 over the past five years from its $250,000 annual street maintenance budget to patch potholes and replace some parts of 20th Street -- but those are band-aids, figuratively speaking, and they account for a disproportionate amount of a fund that’s supposed to pay for roadwork throughout East Grand Forks. The $12,000 to remove the frost boils would come from that fund, as well.
Mayor Steve Gander said that the financial impasse on 20th is a challenge.
“And yet it’s one we can work through,” he said. “I hate to say that it’s a downside to our policy and then kind of leave it at that because the policy has some upsides, also.”
Last fall, city leaders considered revising that policy, but ultimately decided to keep it as-is. Some other cities in Minnesota set aside a certain amount of property tax money each year for medium- and long-term roadworks, then use it to lower the amount residents have to pay when it’s their street’s turn to be fixed.
But, in East Grand Forks, switching to that sort of plan would presumably mean a tax hike, and council members were reluctant to enact one. Some, Gander foremost among them, also worried that changing the policy would be unfair to the people who had most recently paid under the existing one.
“That’s a hard one to kind of reconcile,” Gander said Friday.
And any city would be hard-pressed to free up the money needed for a large-scale street project, according to Gander, who said, years down the road, the city might change its policy and create a pool of funds to pay for street replacement projects.
“Who knows in 20 years what the political climate is going to be like as far as the street replacement policy? All we know is, back to this moment, do we have the option of leave it alone and let it go into total disrepair? No. Do we have the funds, citywide, to keep putting 20 or 30,000 dollars a year of our quarter of a million that has to go across the whole city to keep that street in passable condition? The answer’s no,” he said. “And on the other end of it, do we have the wherewithal to put 40 to 60,000 dollars per property on the current property owners in special assessments? The answer’s no. So, by process of elimination, we have to find a solution somewhere in between there. That’s where we are.”
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August 16, 2020 at 06:00PM
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How do you fix 20th Street? - Grand Forks Herald
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