During a special meeting held Tuesday, Sept. 5, the Decorah Street Committee and City Council began discussions regarding the city’s Street Improvement Plan for Fiscal Year 2025. A color-coded map was displayed, showing every street in the city as being either green, yellow, orange or red, with green being new or refurbished pavement and red representing streets needing immediate attention.
Almost dead center was Heivly Street – a huge red line tracing a path from State Street to Court Street. Issues with Heivly have been at the forefront of the committee’s agenda for years, especially west Heivly. Heavy rains wreak havoc at Heivly and Mechanic and Heivly and Mill, and the committee wants to focus on those areas first.
City Engineer Jeremy Bril pointed out that although some work has been completed on the drainage by the movie theater, Heivly Street was not touched.
“We are proposing one large project,” Bril elaborated. The project would start with a new storm sewer pipe that would discharge into the high school pond, run down Claiborne and towards the city hall intersection, then over to the movie theater and tie in into the drainage work that was done there.
Looking at the project in phases, phase one would be a 40-inch pipe going into the high school pond.
Phase two would run from the cleaners to the movie theater and would include a new storm sewer routing west from the theater, complete street reconstruction and possibly a recreational path.
Phase three would focus on Heivly west of Mill Street and would include underground utilities and the movement of some sanitary sewer pipes, as well as full street reconstruction and a redesign of Heivly at the Mill Street intersection. The cost for phase three would be more than $1 million.
“The streets are falling apart because we can’t get water off of them,” said one committee member. “We are past the point of anything but tearing out the street.”
The group discussed possibly narrowing the road and widening the sidewalk, since the street is a primary artery for bicyclists and walkers to and from work and school. Additionally, one of the two large water mains under Heivly is more than 150 years old and should be replaced.
The entire project from start to finish is estimated to cost more than $2 million. The group then discussed whether to try and to accomplish the project in one year or split it up over several years. Some positives cited for completing the project all at once included saving money due to materials being bought in bulk and a contractor being mobilized only once, as well as no redundancy of tearing up recently completed work to continue the job in progress.
Negatives included the fiscal stretch the city would endure, as well as postponement of all other street projects on the calendar for the year. To split the project across several years would be softer on the budget but could possibly include ripping out street work several times to complete underground work.
At the city council’s regular meeting Sept. 17, the two options for the Heivly Street project – complete it all at once or across several years – was heavily debated, leading to a 4-3 informal council split in favor of all at once. With members so closely divided, it was decided that Bril would sit down with City Manager Travis Goedken and see if a compromise in the form of a third option. A loose deadline of one month – late October or early November – was established for Bril to research a third option to be presented for consideration to the street committee and city council.
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