Originally posted Sunday, March 6, 2011: 1:34pm
The city is considering spending $16,000 to the city’s contracted engineer for a study concerning the condition of the streets.
Is this necessary or is this something we should already know?
Update: Posted on NKY.COM
Alexandria hiring engineers to rate streets
By Chris Mayhew • cmayhew@nky.com 9:25 am, Mar 15, 2011
Alexandria is preparing to pay an engineering service to perform a checkup examination of all the city’s streets.
“I asked the city engineers to give us a proposal, if they would go through all the streets of the city and essentially do a professional assessment of them for us,” said Mayor Bill Rachford.
Rachford said he has authorized CDS Associates Inc., the city’s engineering service, to proceed with a street evaluation.
“It will run us about $16,800, so it’s not an inexpensive study,” he said. “It will give us as the city a logical thought out plan as to how to address which streets and what to do with them.”
Rachford said the city’s public works department has already done some of the work including measuring the streets.
“CDS gave us a $3,000 credit based upon the work our folks have done just to give them the dimensions of the streets,” he said.
The street review will take about four months to complete, and part of the reason the city isn’t doing the work itself is because public works employees are not certified engineers, Rachford said. It will also help address citizen’s concerns from an informed position, he said.
“Rather than us just running out and saying, ‘Well, that street looks OK and we’re going to patch it,’ we can know from the list when each street will need to be fixed,” Rachford said.
Resident Marty Hipple spoke out against the expenditure for an engineering service at the March 3 council town hall meeting.
Hipple said he thought the city’s public works department was perfectly capable of prioritizing which roads to fix first.
“I just think that’s a waste of money, so I’d like to see the spending under control,” Hipple said.
