MUSKEGON COUNTY, Mich. — Those who live and travel along a crumbling Muskegon County Road are holding out hope help will be on the way soon.
In April, we showed you the massive pot holes riddling the surface of Blackmer Road between Ravenna and Coopersville.
In several weeks, locals will vote on a ballot proposal which would advance the money to address the issues.
If the measure isn’t approved, however, the road would likely revert to gravel.
"People are lined up, car against car, waiting their turn to go around this jungle of potholes,” Theresa Cichewicz related during an April interview with 13 OYS.
Cichewicz has lived in the area for years and didn’t mince words when evaluating the well-travelled thoroughfare’s current state.
“It’s a nightmare,” she said.
At least partially because of what it was built upon.
“It's a clay base,” Ken Hulka, managing director of the Muskegon County Road Commission related. “That's not the way to build roads.”
Hulka described the crumbling road as a failed experiment, one orchestrated years earlier by Ravenna Township.
“Regrettably, within the next couple of years, improvements that they made, started falling apart,” he noted.
Paving over the profusion of pot holes, Hulka said, cost his department up to $55-thousand a year.
“We've spent more in the last ten years trying to keep it together than what they spent building the road,” he claimed.
A lasting fix, Hulka said, would come with an even larger price tag -- $3.2-million.
That would be the cost--at least to Ravenna Township taxpayers--under the bond proposal set to appear on the Township’s November ballot.
If approved, the injection of funding would allow crews to peel back, rebuild and surface Blackmer along an approximately three-mile stretch between Ellis and Wilson.
Grinding down the road’s surface and replacing it with gravel, Hulka said, had been billed as a feasible alternative given the snowballing costs associated with maintenance.
“At least we can put a truck out there and blade it every week and keep it a lot smoother,” he suggested. “Ultimately, our goal is give better service than what’s there.”
Hulka indicated that several other local roads that had recently been replaced with gravel and that the projects had generated largely positive feedback.
Under a cost-sharing plan tied to the bond proposal, Ravenna Township voters would shoulder three-quarters of the burden, while the county would cover the balance.
The bond, to be financed over a period of 20 years, would cost homeowners an additional just over $2.00 for every $1000 of taxable value.
For more information, review the proposal here.
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