A priority sewer line repair under Lincoln Avenue that required work when school is out of session will not be completed this year due to funding. Aldermen say $300,000 they believed was set aside by the previous mayor could not be located.
John Craig, 1st Ward alderman who serves as chair of the city council’s finance committee, said, “It’s a misunderstanding of what actually existed for funding and what was set aside. According to our finance director, Mr. Cavallari, that funding doesn’t exist.”
Neither Mayor John Lombardi III nor Dan Cavallari responded to a request for comment.
A year ago, a portion of the sewer along Lincoln Avenue had collapsed, according to Mike Marino, engineer and chief executive officer of Nussbaumer & Clarke, Inc., who consulted on the sewer. While most sewer lines are designed to work with gravity, the Lincoln section is under pressure controlled by valves at a lift station on Hoover Parkway, he said. Workers discovered that some of the control valves didn’t work, Marino said, so they were replaced last summer.
Anita Mullane, 2nd Ward alderman and Kathryn Fogle, 3rd Ward alderman, had been checking during council work sessions for a date when the sewer line would be repaired.
“There always is a ton of flooding over there,” Fogle said of the need.
However, the additional work that was planned for the summer can not go forward before the schools reopen, said Kevin Kirchberger, alderman-at-large who serves as chair of the Highway and Parks Committee, said Tuesday. Kirchberger said the sewer line had been functioning properly this year.
“From what I understand, the current engineer, John Donnelly, said that the line needs to have a camera to search for what is really going on in there,” Craig said. “They don’t really know enough because it hasn’t been scoped properly to identify what is really going on. I would be remiss to say that it’s a $300,000 project because we don’t know what’s structurally going on.”