Five Plymouth streets are in line to get repairs in the coming months. City engineer Rick Gaul presented a list of preliminary street and sidewalk projects to the Board of Works Monday.
It includes Plum Street from North to Harrison, Fairfield Boulevard from Hillcrest to the detention pond, Pidco Drive from Broadway to Oak, Nutmeg Road from the corporate limits to Oakhill, and the entire length of Memory Court.
Gaul says the list was a result of street inventories taken by the city. “Several of the areas have been having flooding,” he says. “Some of the areas – basically, during our survey, [Street] Superintendent [Jim] Marquardt was just concerned about if those will make it through another winter or two, so if it’s alright with you, the preliminary will be the first projects we start working on.”
However, Board of Works member Mike Delp inspected the roads himself and had a few suggestions. He recommended that Plum Street be repaved from North, not just to Harrison, but all the way to Jefferson, “Not to criticize what you’ve done in the past, but I don’t like this breaking things up, like on Liberty when we did part of it and we didn’t do part of it. I’d rather see us do a project all the way through because, number one, I think we’re going to get our best bang for the buck from our contractor if he’s in there and not coming back and doing it the second time and mobilizing the second time.”
Delp feels that the Plum and Pidco projects were more urgent than some of the others on the list, “As I looked at it, just offering my suggestions, I think Memory Court could wait, Nutmeg could wait, I think Fairfield could wait, but I guess I strongly recommend that we do Plum Jefferson to North. Again, I just think it all needs it through there. And then one other street that’s bothered me for quite some time and I’m just going to through it out there is Alexander, Angel to Bayless. I know there’s drainage problems in there. I know there’s curb problems in there. I know that’s going to be more than just a simple repaving, but I drive that quite a bit and I just think that one’s pretty nasty.”
Once Delp made his suggestions, the board voted unanimously to approve the list of preliminary projects.
Also during Monday’s meeting, Gaul asked the Board of Works to approve a memorandum of understanding with the Plymouth Community School Corporation to address some drainage issues at the high school, “Most of you are aware we’ve had flooding down in Randolph Street. The school’s looking at adding on. We’re looking at trying to work with them over a period of time here, so we can get some of the hard surface that drains into that area off and going into another storm water system.”
The Board of Works voted to approve the memorandum of understanding.
