Agenda - Council - 01/27/1981 - Laserfiche WebLink

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TO: City Administrator FROM: Public Works Director RE: Report on street projects for 1980 DATE: January 14, 1981 As you know, we had a lot of flooding problems in the spring of 1980, partly because of a heavy winter rain and partly because of a fast spring thaw. We were able to take care of most o£ the problem areas but there are a few that we can't do anything about because of low areas or water draining on private property. Some areas will need storm sewer and many areas will need drainage easements to solve the problem. There are num- erous driveway culverts that are plugged and stopping drainage but we do not have the manpower to clean them all. We do these mainly on a com- plaint basis. The blacktopping of streets and driveways will help this problem because there will be less washing of said from the street. Cleaning culverts is not an easy task because it sometimes involves clean- lng a mile of ditch to get it to drain. If the ditches aren't cleaned be- fore the roads are blacktopped, the dirt has to be loaded on trucks and hauled away. I would like to clean the ditches out prior to blacktopping but with a small crew like we have, we are usually busy doing something else at the time. After the streets have been blacktopped, it is twice as hard to do and takes more than twice as long to do it. This possibly sho~ld be a bid item so the contractor can do the work prior to blacktopping the street. Our street name signs end reg~ulatory signs will be taking a lot more of our time now than in the past. I have seen more vandalism to signs this past year than in all my prior years put together. Some signs are knocked over by accident but a lot o£ them are deliberately run over and have to be re- paired or replaced, which is very time consuming. There is a lot of park work that isn't getting done but because of the necessary work that has to be done in the other departments, I have the park department on a low priority basis. We have a minimum of equipment in our parks and we try to keep that maintained and the grass moved and that's about all we have time for. Our newest park with the tennis courts takes a con- siderable amount' of time just to keep the broken glass cleaned off the courts and the tables repaired. A lot of the parks should have black dirt hauled on them end seeded but it would be rather costly unless we can get the dirt free. I don't expect to get caught up on the backlog o£ work that should be done in the near future, but we can get by, doing just what has to be done as we've done in the past. I think something for the City Council to consider