In Wayne County it’s a game of waiting forever

Road repairs.
We’ve been talking about them for months now. This past winter was more brutal than usual on our roads, and residents have been steadily complaining about when the city is going to begin repairing potholes.
Last week we reported that the city tested out a new method of pothole repairs – well, at least newish to Hamtramck; it was first used several years ago.
This week the city rolled out a full-on pothole repair project that will eventually hit every street in the city.
Except for one notable exception.
Conant.
Talk about a cluster of confusion. The portion of Conant that runs through Hamtramck has three masters, so to speak of. Wayne County technically owns it, but Detroit also plays a part for the portion that runs on its side of the border of Hamtramck.
That means any improvement to the street requires the county to get a hold of Detroit to get it to dedicate federal monies to help repair it.
Got it?
City Manager Katrina Powell has met with Wayne County officials about fixing Conant but has been told it’s way down on the list for repairs. She has also been told that she will have to keep coming back to reserve our place at the table.
That’s a lot to ask for our busy city manager who has plenty of other things to do. Yet this is how Wayne County functions. Keep spinning our wheels.
The last time Hamtramck’s portion of Conant received significant attention was in 1974.
Conant can be held as an example of out-of-date thinking by our regional leaders. Why in the world does it take so many people to sign off on fixing this street?
There are too many layers of overlapping political entities here, and it is also an example of why it is so hard to do business in Wayne County. There are too many players and not enough decision makers.
It’s a road in need of repair – fix it. If we were in Oakland County this road would have been repaired years ago – but not here in tired-old Wayne County, mired in its political divisions and old-fashioned thinking.
That’s how Wayne County rolls.
In Wayne County we have to wait our so-called turn, which could be decades, while one of our main arteries continues to crumble in disrepair.
This is a county that has gained the dubious distinction of having to pay to play.
We thought with a new county executive in charge things would change, but not so. It’s more foot dragging and getting nothing done while giving the illusion that progress is being made.
Conant has more potholes than actual street. There is heavy traffic here and a lot of it is truck traffic cutting down to I-94. It is a major artery for Hamtramck residents to get from one side of town to another.
There are dozens and dozens of businesses located there that depend on visitors. If their cars can’t make it down Conant without suffering from some kind of damage, those businesses will lose customers and close up.
Amazingly, Conant was repaved just north of the city just recently but that stopped right at Hamtramck’s border. The county got its act together to pave that portion but couldn’t complete the job.
In a functional setting, the paving would have continued all the way through Hamtramck.
But again, this is Wayne County. It’s business — or dysfunction – as usual.