MOUNT VERNON—To evaluate street conditions and maintenance needs, the city sent a letter and survey to 175 East Burgess and East Hamtramck households, asking for feedback.
As of Friday morning, 34 residents responded. The post office returned 15 surveys from vacant addresses.
Nate Thomas is also following up on the survey door-to-door. Safety-service Director Tanner Salyers said the goal is to receive 100 to 125 surveys.
“Those are easily two of the worst city streets,” Salyers said. “They’re still brick, and we’ve gotten a lot of back and forth on whether or not they need to be brick.”
Salyers said with the way the city repairs brick streets, they last for a long time.
“We do brick a little bit different. We now lay essentially a big concrete apron and place the bricks in,” he explained.
“So if we need to fix them, we can take them back out. We do it differently, so it lasts longer.”
Brick is a significantly longer process with more upfront cost. Asphalt is cheaper upfront but requires money to maintain through the years.
Salyers said that while people throughout the community have weighed in on the brick vs. asphalt issue, city officials are first reaching out to the people who live on the streets.
“If you look at our budget narrative, we talked about doing community-based projects, and we were going to go to the communities first,” he said.
“This is one of the projects that gets talked about a lot and then routinely gets ignored because we have emergencies across the city.”
Street survey deadline is March 28
The survey asks whether the resident is a homeowner or tenant. It also provides space for additional comments.
Other survey questions include:
•How satisfied are you with the current conditions of the brick streets on Burgess and Hamtramck?
•How important is it that Burgess and Hamtramck streets retain their brick surface rather than being replaced with asphalt?
•Would you rather the city wait to finance a multi-phase project that retains and repairs the brick streets even if it takes significantly longer to complete?
•Would you find it acceptable for the city to replace the brick streets with asphalt to expedite the project, shorten the construction time, and significantly reduce the costs?
Salyers said the administration hopes to have the responses in by March 28. The administration will “distill that information” and present it at the April 14 city council meeting.
“In our 2025 budget narrative, we said we would look at important community projects. We want the council to assist the administration in prioritizing these projects with data-driven decisions,” he said.
“And we want the information to come from the communities themselves.”
Salyers said the survey is providing important information not pertinent to the brick street project that the city can address. Issues include street lights, alleys, and drainage.
“So even if the majority of the neighborhood says it would rather wait for a more extensive brick project, we’re still going to be able to make minor improvements that some folks have asked for that we wouldn’t have known about had we not done the survey,” Salyers said.
