Hamtramck_web

HAMTRAMCK, MICHIGAN ing, which tends to last five to seven years, versus cold patching which will last, maybe, a season. And, if you’re having to plow the roads, they’re not really going to last. You’re just wasting money.We felt that is was a better plan for us to do spray patching, which would allow us to build up some money in our road fund to attack a lot of the streets that still need complete makeovers. So, we spray patched most every street, and those streets that we didn’t patch, we completely re-did. “Here in Hamtramck, many of our streets are one-way and there’s parking on both sides, because our homes do not have driveways; they have alleyways with garages.And so, those people who use their garages for storage tend to park on the street. So, we typically will only do the center lane of a street,when we’re doing a road project.And if the parking lanes on either side of the street are in pretty good condition,we just leave those and just do the center land that people drive down.” “This year, we’re also doing numerous road projects - com- plete reconstruction of roads.We did another study, last month, to get an idea of how the roads changed since last year.There are some that are still holding up from the spray patching; there are others that just fell apart completely.We did that just recently and so we’re going to be attacking our roads, first thing.” Work has also progressed on the City’s gas and sewer lines. “We had a gas main replacement project that we were part- nering with DCE Energy,” Powell reports. “They replaced various gas mains around the community.They’ve been doing that every year, for the last couple of years, and that was a huge undertaking. Our community was literally torn up, last year.We also had a sewer relief project that we did, last year. It took the entire summer.Our sewers, in most cases, have not been touched for a hundred years. So,we’re replacing the crock with PVC piping.We’re lining those pipes in our alleyways.Our alleys are crumbling, so we have a plan, this year, to start working on our alleys.” Powell explains the funding mechanisms that are paying for Unlike some other nearby locales, whose populations were decreasing along with the region’s slumping economy, Hamtramck’s actually began an uptick in 1990s. Today, it is still growing, while becoming one of the most ethnically diverse and international cities in the American Midwest.