City rolls out pothole repairs, starting with emergency routes

A citywide street repair program kicked off this week. But one street is noticeably not included: Conant, which is county owned. Wayne County has told city officials that repairs to Conant is way down on the list of county roads in need of repair.

By Charles Sercombe
Pothole repairs are coming down your street soon.
On Thursday, a work crew kicked off a citywide pothole repair program by beginning on Holbrook and continuing on all emergency lanes.
After that, the crew will hit each side street.
“They’ll be spray patching every day,” said City Manager Katrina Powell at a city council work session this past Tuesday.
The city will continue fixing potholes for the entire season.
Funding for the project comes from the city’s own road repair fund and from a federal grant called Act 51, which has $3 million in it, said Powell.
Not all streets will be treated equally. Some will be patched and milled down, while others will have whole sections repaved.
Powell said Lumpkin is so bad that the entire street will be repaved.
Mark Ragsdale, the Director of Public Works, will be drawing up a repair plan for each street. That plan, he said, will be made public.
There is one street, however, that won’t see any improvements, at least in the near future. Powell has been meeting with Wayne County officials to get Conant repaved, which is something city officials have been trying to get done for several years.
Unfortunately, there are some obstacles in getting repairs made to this county-owned road. The county has ranked Conant 86th on a list of county-owned roads to repair.
The earliest it could get attention is in 2016, but it all depends on funding and when it runs out.
It gets even more complicated. Repairs to the portion of Conant that runs through Hamtramck also require Detroit officials to agree to allow the county to dip into its federal funding to repair the Detroit side of Conant.
That means Hamtramck has to negotiate with both Wayne County and Detroit officials.
Powell said she will continue to meet with county officials and advocate for Conant’s repair.
“I’m not quitting,” she told the city council.
Another wrinkle in the project is that each year the county re-assesses its roads and gives each street a new ranking of need. Conant is considered a “minor arterial” road based on traffic use.
There is one way, however, to push Conant higher up on the list of streets that get repaired: If it becomes impassable, the county would be forced to take action.
That prompted City Councilmember Titus Walters to, ah, suggest facilitating that to happen.
“Let’s have a good old block party to destroy it,” he said, joking of course.
Powell said the last time Conant was maintained was in 1974, and to a small extent in the 1980s when the middle of the road was replaced.
Another problem street is Hamtramck Dr., which has three separate owners.
For the first 153 feet, starting from Conant, Detroit is responsible for maintenance, and the next 153 feet is Hamtramck’s responsibility. At Jos. Campau, the county takes over control of the street.
That street has taken a beating from heavy truck travel. Powell said potholes were temporarily patched after Wayne County Sheriffs at the Wayne County Jail, located at Conant and Hamtramck Dr., complained of wear and tear on their cars.