Whitefish neighborhood approaches city with road issues

The condition of the roads in The Lakes neighborhood has spurred the residents to bring the situation to the attention of the Whitefish City Council.

John Murray, a resident of the Lakes Homeowners Association, told Council at its Dec. 5 meeting that safety has become an issue when driving through the subdivision.

As a recent member of the association’s board, Murray has heard numerous complaints over the years from the residents about the dangerous and deteriorating road conditions in the neighborhood.

“The conditions of the road are such that you have speed bumps. Basically, the ground swells up, pushes the asphalt up. We’ve had people tell us that they’ve had their cars damaged,” he said. “We have depressions where the road will sink in and you’ll have a substantial dip in the road. We have manhole covers that are four or five inches higher than the road and some that are lower.”

Murray said the residents have worked with Whitefish Public Works Director Craig Workman and found him to be “very cooperative.”

Whitefish City Manager Dana Smith told Council she and Workman have met with The Lakes’ HOA subcommittee for the roads, drove the subdivision and found two intersections that had severe damage. The city budgeted money for repairs in that area — one has already been completed and the other is set for work in the spring.

“One of the challenges with this area is that the road has been in disrepair for a long time and it was originally installed through the development,” Smith said. “The challenge that we see is funding.”

The Lakes residents decided to send a letter and 242 individually signed petitions to the city to make them aware of the poor road conditions.

“We got 100%, or close to it, of the permanent residents of the association,” said Murray. “We’ve got pretty much everybody in accord in this regard that our roads need to be fixed.”

The letter asks the city to fully assess the structural integrity and replace or properly repair the deteriorating roads in the subdivision. All roads in the subdivision are dedicated to the city and open to public use.

The petition says “the poorly constructed roadways are hazardous to motor vehicles, unsafe for bicycles and dangerous for pedestrian traffic.”

The specific areas of concern presented by the association include the safety risk to pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers, drivers swerving to avoid pavement heaves, bumps and potholes in the roads, as well as improper and inadequate drainage leading to the premature deterioration of streets and adjacent properties.

“The roads weren’t built well, I think, in the beginning, and that’s the problem,” Murray concluded.

As a way to fund the project of repairing roads, Smith said this area could create a special improvement district (SID) for the city to reconstruct the road through the subdivision. With an SID, the city pays for the construction project and over several years, a special improvement tax is placed on the properties in the district to pay for the work.

“It’s just a tricky place to try and build a subdivision,” Workman said. “I think the engineers that worked on the project did the best they could with the technologies they had at the time, 20 years ago, to try and construct public infrastructure on that land.”

Workman said the installation of the water, sewer, storm sewer and the building foundations created a myriad of pathways for groundwater to travel including on the roads.

“I think the ultimate solution is some fairly significant reconstruction that we just don’t have the current budget capacity for,” Workman said.

He added that he thinks a special improvement district would be the fairest way to proceed and that the overall reconstruction of the roads is going to be “extremely expensive.”

“In our initial conversations they didn’t seem real pleased with that response so, obviously, that’s why they’ve come forward and we have several hundred petitions from the actual property owners,” Workman said. “It’s not great out there and I just don’t have a real crystal ball solution that anyone’s really going to be happy with.”

Council discussed how to address the problem.

“The developers built the roads probably as quickly and cheaply as they possibly could and they turned them over to the city without having been built to a certain standard and then we (the whole city) are the ones who are asked to pay for it,” Councilor Steve Qunell said. “The message to homeowners out there should be if you want it fixed… then you’re going to have to pay for it because we can’t expect the city to pay for the roads that have only been there for 20 years.”

Councilor Andy Feury said The Lakes association had come to the resort tax committee with the problem months ago. The city uses resort tax funds for road construction projects and sets out a list of priorities for which roads get reconstructed.

“There are projects on the list from before (The Lakes) roads were actually built, and to go ahead and now push those ahead… is ludicrous in my personal opinion,” Feury said.

He noted that the property before it was developed into a subdivision formed a pond in the spring and therefore is going to struggle with water issues.