Alley work's deferral steams Geneva residents

When the city of Geneva recently revealed the list of streets it intends to fix this spring, it upset a bunch of Geneva East subdivision residents.

Why isn't their cruddy, bumpy, patch-on-patch, gravel-strewn 20-something-year-old asphalt alley for Manchester Course on the list, they asked the city council Monday.

The answer is not one they like.

A. Alley rehabilitation is a separate project from the annual crack-filling and asphalt-laying street work.

B. The city doesn't think it has the $500,000 it would take to rebuild their alley, thanks to a steep decline in sales tax revenue caused by the sour economy.

"The alley was supposed to be done last year," resident Becky Hruby told the council recently. "Others have been fixed. Ours is the biggest. At the same time, we keep getting overlooked."

The Manchester Course alley was supposed to be rebuilt this year. Other alleys in the neighborhood have already been built. But it was pulled from the proposed 2009-10 budget, which the city council will vote on Monday. Hruby said a city worker told her that perhaps the city could do half this year, half the next.

"We pay taxes to have our streets maintained, and our streets are not being maintained," she said.

Other neighbors noted that they worry that children will become hurt when they ride their bicycles over potholes, and that some senior citizens are afraid in the winter to walk out in the dark to get their mail from the neighborhood mailboxes, for fear of tripping.

The city does apply cold-patch asphalt mix to potholes each year in the winter and spring. "I think it is a waste of time and money because it comes right out, and then you have rocks everywhere," Hruby said.

Water drainage is poor, contributing to the deterioration; if the alley were repaved with concrete, the city would slope the concrete toward drains in the center. When the Geneva East alleys were built, they were privately owned, and may have been built to a lesser standard than what would have been required if they were public alleys, city attorney Charles Radovich said. Eventually the city took over the alleys.

Mayor Kevin Burns said the city intends to patch potholes with hot asphalt, once asphalt plants open up in May. But it doesn't want to repave the whole alley, at a cost of $100,000, because it thinks the repair would only last a year or two.

"It bothers me that when the city took over the alley that it hasn't really had any kind of permanent solution as far as the potholes go," resident Sally Kelton said.

"It just boils down to a half-a-million price tag that we simply don't have," Burns said.

The proposed city budget can be viewed at geneva.il.us/budget/budget.htm.