Published: May 08, 2008 05:20 pm            

Voters to decide on street repair bonds Saturday

The voters of Commerce will decide Saturday if they want the city to borrow $3 million to repair streets. But how far that money would go is still in question.

“It’s obviously based on the size of the project,” said Interim City Manager Marc Clayton. “We’ve identified different projects to the City Council during a workshop that are possibilities to be a road project. Some of them are big, some of them are not so big.”

Public Works Director Tracy Lunceford said he laid out 15 to 20 projects for the Council’s consideration, all in different categories. Some were for state highways which run through Commerce, which the city might receive state funding on to help with repairs.

“We’re still required to help with the maintenance on (those highways),” Lunceford said. “It would be a dual funding project. We could make it go a little further if we did that, but we would be stuck with the one street getting attention to it.”

Lunceford said he also proposed small projects which would use only the city’s bond money, but which would cover more streets.

What most people don’t realize, according to Lunceford, is that before the city can do something to a street, it has to do something to the utilities under the street. Some of the bond money could well be used for utilities, depending on the direction of the Council.

Lunceford listed some water and sewer lines in the projects which would have to be totally replaced. He is unsure how old some of them are.

“We’ve got maps that were revised in the early 60s and a lot of these lines were on those maps prior to the 60s,” he said.

Another problem the city will have to consider is drainage.

“That’s something that we brought up in our discussions is doing a drainage study of the town so we could start addressing the major problems with drainage before we actually did street work,” Lunceford said.

Clayton said that would probably be the first expenditure of the bond money.

Decisions on street projects would have to wait until the study was done, according to Lunceford, because drainage would have to be included in the projects.

The city currently sets aside $75,000 a year for street maintenance, according to Clayton.

“Obviously, that doesn’t allow you to do any kind of a project,” he said. “That’s just filling in holes, basically.”

Lunceford said that an average street reconstruction will last the city 15 to 20 years. A patch will last five to 10 years at best.

The last three streets the city has done major repairs on are Pecan, Aldridge and Alamo, in that order. Alamo Street was repaired while the new City Hall was being built.

Clayton said the bond proposition only gives the city authority to sell $3 million in bonds for streets.

“It does not mean, necessarily, we would go out and sell $3 million worth of debt right after the election,” he said. “We would probably do it in increments as the projects demanded funding. There’s no real time limit when we would issue the debt.”

In any case, it will be up to the voters to decide on Saturday.

        

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