Townhall meeting to discuss funding Linden’s street repair

Tuesday, May 3rd at 6:00 PM at Music City Texas, the Linden City Council hosted a Town Hall meeting to share the approaches to fixing the streets in Linden. At the meeting guests City Consulting Engineer, Kiron Browning, PE, and Financial Planner Jason Hughes (shown at the podium) spoke to the council and people in the community about the condition of the options to fix them. Approximately 80 residents showed up to listen and voice their opinion.

At the meeting, Hughes shared at least three different proposals that the city can choose from to fix Linden’s Roads. The price tag varied depending on how much road work the people in the community wanted to be done. The general consensus from those who attended was in agreement that the road work needed to be done. The only question was whether they wanted to spend the money to get it fixed right away or wait a little longer to find other solutions.

City Consulting Engineer, Kiron Browning, PE noted in his presentation that his company was hired to do an evaluation of the roads in Linden. At that time, they concluded that all the roads were in blighted condition. For that reason, instead of doing a pass/fail analysis they compared just the roads on Linden to each other and came up with a scale that would only compare the City’s roads to each other. One being the worst, seven being the best. Based on the analysis, the amount of the money spent would fix the ones first and down the line.

After the two guests spoke people in the crowd were given nearly unlimited time to share comments and ask questions. Several people in attendance showed unwavering support for getting the project done right away but wanted to make sure all the streets were taken care of not just put a band-aid on it and spend a lot of money; they wanted their roads fixed too.

Some in attendance were concerned if adding additional property at an uncertain time was the right move. Moreover, they were concerned about the impact additional property taxes would have on the poor and elderly. A few wondered if some work could be done now and some later. All seemed in agreement that they wanted more information.

There was some confusion on how exactly a bond would impact their property taxes because the screen was hard to see. At the meeting, it was noted that some of the information could be found online. City Manager Lee Elliott said that free hard copies of the Town Hall presentation are available at City Hall. The documents can also be downloaded on the home page of the City’s website at www.lindentx.gov.

Elliott notes that “since the Town Hall, staff and elected officials have had interaction with citizens regarding where they stand on the bond amounts. There seems to be almost 100 percent agreement about the need to fix the streets, the only debate is how much to fix and bond. This evening at the regular council meeting, the council chose to postpone a decision on whether to bond $3.5 or $6 million dollars until Thursday, May 19th at 6:00 pm when our financial planner can discuss the bond market response possibilities of the two different councils.

The general view of the citizens and council is we have to bond our streets to ever be able to fix and eventually maintain our street and drainage infrastructure. This is a big decision for a small community like ours, probably being our largest tax-based city government capital improvement.”

Some of the other concerns was how the sewer system would affect fixing the streets. Elliott says that at the Monday meeting the council approved advertising for a sewer study. “We currently have no sewer study, and the vast majority of our sewer infrastructure is pre-1950s Era and the useful life is 30 years. Our sewer is negatively affecting our streets and we have lines collapsing on several streets. This study will be the beginning to address the sewer system which has never really been attacked by the City before. With the USDA water line project getting close to being bid, there is a nice blueprint being implemented to provide a solid infrastructure base in Linden!”

The majority of Tuesdays Townhall was streamed live on the Journal Sun Facebook page. Both the presentation and the community feedback were recorded.

Lee lastly notes that “Mayor Reynolds, council and staff desire as much citizen input as possible. The civility and dialog at the town hall meeting were great. I would ask citizens to share their views with Mayor Reynolds and all council members. The meeting Thursday, March 19th will be another opportunity for citizens to share their views with Council and we invite everyone to please attend.”

On a side note, The City of Linden, “to help with customer service and to get accurate readings, the City will use our ARPA $450k grant for water meters. The meters will provide remote real-time reads for water and provide notice to City staff if a customer has a leak. Our meter infrastructure has long since outlived its useful life. Meters never speed up, they slow down with time. By receiving accurate read with new meters, it will assist in not having to increase rates as much without new meters.”