Smith Ave., Edison St. to be redone this summer

ANTIGO — At a City Council Public Works Committee meeting Wednesday night, Street Commissioner Kirk Packard announced intentions to re-pave part of Smith Ave. this summer.

The Street Department originally planned to re-pave Smith from Edison to Deleglise St., but scaled back because of funding.

“We wanted to do Smith Ave. from Edison to Deleglise St. — that’s 1,600 feet,” Packard said. “But that’s like $62,000 just for the blacktop, and we only have $60,000 this year. So we backed it off to go to Lincoln. So that’s about $43,000 worth of asphalt. Then all that other work will be done in-house.”

One factor that drove the decision to repair Smith Ave. was made in part because of its relatively basic makeup compared to that of other deteriorating streets in the city that Packard and other officials acknowledged also badly need to be redone.

“Elm St. is the one I’m talking about as far as there’s more wrong with it than we can do. That one has got a sanitary sewer that is clay with a big sag in it that we’ve known for years. It also has a water main which is six inch cast iron that needs to be replaced. That’s not something that we would do — we would have to put it on a five year plan,” Packard said, before referring to another poor street. “We don’t have enough money to do the curb and gutter for Pine St. What I think we should do is Smith Ave. Smith Ave. is bad and Smith Ave. doesn’t have any curb.”

Public Works Department Head Charley Brinkmeier said utilities work will be done near Smith Ave. as well.

“Edison St. flows up to Smith and then comes across and comes through Saratoga Park,” Brinkmeier said. “We have a problem over on Edison St. with flooding. The storm sewer there is too small. So we’re going to look at upsizing just that section that we’re going to be doing under Smith. So if we’re going to be doing the roadway surface, we want to upsize that pipe. Granted, it’s still going to be going into a smaller pipe, but at least that section is done. So we’re thinking ahead so that when we get time to go through the park and upsize that, we’ll be ready to go.”

Sixth Ward Alderman Joel Wagner explained that his constituents have voiced concerns to him about several other city streets.

“Every now and then I get stopped and a few of my people, my patrons, they’ll kind of ask me, ‘When are we going to get Virginia done? When are we going to get this street done?’ and I don’t want to keep pushing them aside and things like that, but it’s getting kind of hard to tell them, ‘I don’t know if we’re ever going to get it done now,’” Wagner said.

An outside contractor will also re-pave a portion of Edison this summer, according to Brinkmeier. The project’s cost is $3 million, though $1 million was funded by a grant.

Brinkmeier said the city may have to get loans to fund other future roadwork.

“Hudson, Watson, Virginia have been on our radar for a long time,” he said. “We all know that they’re terrible streets. That’s something that we as a council, as committees, at some point we’re probably going to have to bond for it. We can only get so many grants at so many times. When they all mesh together like they did on Edison St., that’s great, but sometimes they don’t.”

The conditions of declining streets in the city seem bound to come up at future council meetings.

“Kirk and I are going to get together some supply and cost estimates of actually all of our bad streets so that the council can see, ‘OK, it’s going to cost us X number of millions of dollars to do this. Are we willing to bond for that to get it done?’ Budget time is in August and September, so we’d like to get this in front of those guys before then and say, ‘Hey, what do you want to do here?’ The committee is asking for these roads to be done, but we obviously don’t have the money to do them,” Brinkmeier said.

Mayor Terry Brand said he believes past city councils have neglected to prioritize Antigo’s streets in the budgets they’ve approved.

“We have 58 miles of streets here. If they would all last 58 years, we need to be re-doing one mile every year…but they don’t all last 58 years. Very few of them last 58 years, so maybe we should be doing two or three miles a year,” Brand said. “It’s controversial, and I’m shooting bullets at people, but it’s their responsibility to ask questions. We approved the 2024 budget on a 9-0 vote, and not one person asked a single question. That’s why. The question should have been, ‘How much do we have in the budget to repair streets this year? Oh, $80,000?’ How much is that going to do? A block? That’s not enough.”