Meridian Rotarians were given an inside look at ongoing infrastructure projects on Wednesday as they hosted Public Works Director David Hodge at their weekly meeting.
Hodge, a native of Meridian, spent more than 25 years in the engineering field before being appointed to the city post by Mayor Jimmie Smith in 2021. The mission of public works, he said, is to lay the foundation for the city to thrive. The department works to provide safe, reliable infrastructure to support development and growth in the city.
“That’s what we wake up to do every morning,” he said. “We want to support growth and development.”
Public works is supported through the annual city budget, which allocated about $10.9 million in general fund spending for the department. Of that, Hodge said, $3 million is for solid waste service.
The department also has just shy of $18 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds that it plans to put toward sewer projects relating the federal consent decree, internet use tax funds, of which about $2.2 million is available each year for the city to spend on paving roads, roughly $18.9 million in the water and sewer fund and a $40 million bond issue for consent decree work that was passed in 2019.
Meridian is also set to receive a $10 million federal appropriation once spending bills are passed by congress and has been given authorization to pursue an additional $30 million in federal funds, Hodge said.
Aside from the consent decree, which is a legally binding agreement with the federal government in which the city has promised to address repeated sewer overflows, public works is hitting hard on paving, installing cameras at intersections and installing new street signs. Hodge said his department’s motto is, “pave, baby, pave.”
In the past few years, the city of Meridian has paved 35 miles of road, Hodge said, spending a total of $7.4 million. That comes out to about $218,000 per mile, he said.
Assistant Public Works Director Mike Van Zandt said installing cameras at intersections is one of several tools the city is utilizing to help improve traffic flow. Cameras and radar, he said, have the potential to be a great tool for the city, but they aren’t perfect.
“The cameras we’re putting up now, they can be tricked by lighting, they can by strange colors of a car, a strange combination of lighting and they can be tricked by bad drivers driving in the wrong lane,” he said. “It happens all the time.”
The cameras are an ongoing project with changes to the system made daily to address complaints from residents or make improvements to the system, Van Zandt said. The ultimate goal, he said, is to have a traffic control center, where intersections can be monitored and reprogrammed to account for things like parades, festivals and other events where some roads are blocked off.
“We can’t do that today, but it’s coming,” he said.
David Ruhl of Waggoner Engineering, which is acting as program manager for the city’s consent decree, said efforts to find and repair damaged or broken sewer pipes are continuing throughout the city as Meridian works to comply with the 2019 agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice.
As it works to repair its infrastructure, Ruhl said, Meridian is also trying to educate its residents about what can and cannot be put into the sewer. The city recently implemented a Fats, Oils and Grease program, or FOG program, that mandates proper disposal of the sewer-clogging materials. Fats, oils and grease, Ruhl said, combine with other material to form “fatbergs” that have been shown to contribute to sewer overflow problems nationwide.
Ruhl said the city crews, along with contractors, are working to clean the congealed “fatbergs” from the sewer lines with vacuum trucks. The effort has already reduced the number of sewer overflows, he said, but with 40 years of buildup, there is still more to go.