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Resident praises road repaving, asks who will pay to fix poorly installed culvert
Summary
Resident Mike Orchard praised the village's road repaving program and DPW work but said one culvert installed by an engineer/contractor on Burnell into Pheasant Run was improperly installed and asked who will pay the roughly $15,000 to fix it.
At the July 10 joint meeting of the Village Board and Plan Commission, resident Mike Orchard praised recent road repaving funded by village borrowing and described work by the Department of Public Works replacing culverts. Orchard said the village borrowed $1.5 million in 2024 for road repaving and another $1.5 million for 2025 and credited the contractor Stark and DPW staff for the work.
“The roads have been neglected for many years and are getting done quite reasonable. I think Stark did an excellent job this year,” Orchard said during the citizen comment period.
Orchard described typical resurfacing costs and contrasted them with full reconstruction: he said chip-seal or overlay work costs “$30 a square yard,” that a full reconstruction “goes from $160 to $200 a square yard,” and that complete reconstruction could have raised costs on the year’s projects to about $9 million. Orchard also said DPW replaced six culverts last year and another six this year, and he described one problem on Burnell at Pheasant Run where the installation by the engineer and contractor had incorrect elevations.
“That was installed quite poorly and all the elevations are wrong. Now this year we had it paying, I think it was in the area of about $15,000 to dig it out, reset it, get the right pitch, get the right height, repave it, etcetera,” he said, and asked who would pay for the corrective work.
Why it matters: Orchard’s comments document resident support for the village’s pavement program and note a specific construction defect where Orchard said the engineer and contractor, not DPW, were responsible. He asked the board to determine financial responsibility for the corrective work; the transcript does not record a board determination or staff answer at that meeting.
Discussion vs. decision: The record shows citizen comment and explanation of costs (discussion-only). There was no formal referral, motion, or vote recorded that assigned financial responsibility for the culvert work.
Clarifying details from the meeting: Orchard said the village borrowed $1.5 million in 2024 and another $1.5 million in 2025 for repaving; he cited per-square-yard cost ranges for overlay vs. reconstruction and estimated the corrective culvert work cost at about $15,000.
