Morgan Hill – Don’t call them mean streets.
Years of abuse made them rough, so who can blame them for lashing back a your car’s undercarriage?
The Public Works Department has a diplomatic solution: Enter the annual street resurfacing and repair project, which kicked off Monday along Peak Avenue between West Dunne Avenue and West Main Street.
This year, work crews are targeting 30 pot-holed roads in Morgan Hill. A full list is available on the city’s Web site. The project will cost $941,000 and will take about 45 days to complete.
Residents will be notified by mail 72 hours in advance of any work planned on their street. Specific times and dates of road work will additionally be posted on barricades in the street.
While the scheduled maintanence is sure to cause some motorists headaches, the city will face higher repair costs down the road, so to speak, if shabby roads aren’t fixed now.
“There’re a lot of studies that say the longer you defer road maintenance, the more it costs,” said Public Works Director Jim Ashcraft.
In other words, roads are easier to fix than they are to build. Sometimes, the path to building a new road is not fixing the one that’s already there.
That considered, the city is spending roughly $1 million on this year’s round of repairs. It’s more than the usual amount, but some of the costs are being covered by federal and state funds. The Morgan Hill Redevelopment Agency picks up the rest of the tab.
This year’s list of road repairs range from sealing cracks with hot oil – sounds torturous, buts it’s relatively mundane – to grinding up faulty asphalt for removal and replacement, a violent process of upheaval reliant on dozens of workers and utility trucks of all kinds.
Those types of removal and replacement projects can last three to four days each.
ONLINE: For a list of schedules streets, visit the city’s Web site at www.morganhill.ca.gov
