It’s been designed, re-designed, proposed, rejected, pushed back, put on hold and scaled back, but Bethany Beach Town Council members appear to finally be ready to move forward — at least a little — on the town’s long-anticipated Streetscape plan.
At a council workshop Jan. 14, the council asked Town Manager Cliff Graviet to pursue hard numbers for cost estimates for one key component of the project: removing some or all of the utility poles from alongside Garfield Parkway on the east side of the town, to the alleyways behind the street-facing buildings.
Council members were in agreement that the existing utility poles along the street are a major aesthetic challenge, and the Streetscape beautification plan had been devised several years ago to deal with such visual eyesores and open up the downtown area both visually and physically.
But costs for the project have been a core problem, since any major reworking of the sidewalks or pavement in the area would require, by law, compliance of the new sidewalks and curb bump-outs with Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations. And they’re not the only ones leery of incurring the costs of those accommodations.
“DelDOT has put off paving the street for a half-dozen years,” Graviet said. “In the last six years they have not done the repaving because of the ADA requirements, which they realize are too costly.”
With those feared costs also in mind, Graviet recommended Bethany’s council take a look at simply removing the utility poles to the nearby alley and patch the sidewalks where they were removed. “Any major work will require ADA compliance,” he said.
Council members did review the most recent concept plan for a larger Streetscape project, but they weren’t entirely pleased about the concept submitted by JMT Engineering last May after the town had asked the consultants to take a new swing at the town’s Streetscape goals and other requirements.
Meeting the town’s requirements for two traffic lanes each way, no loss of existing parking — as had been the case with a 2005 concept that had a net loss of 12 to 17 spaces — and the ADA compliance that would be required for any such major work, Graviet said, JMT’s engineers had been faced with a choice — include a dedicated bicycle lane the town had requested at the behest of input from citizens, or narrow the existing sidewalk by 4 feet. They left out the bicycle lane.
No easy choice in balancing priorities
The bottom line: one of those four requirements – two lanes of traffic each way, no loss of parking, the separate bicycle lane or sidewalk width — would have to be given up in order for the town to meet the ADA requirements any such project would impose.
“Now we have the same problem as five years ago,” former Planning Commissioner and Beautification Committee member Phil Boesch said. “You can’t get all of that in there.”
With 4 feet gone from the sidewalk, the sidewalk would range from as wide as 11 feet at Atlantic Avenue to as narrow as 4 feet near Route 1.
Hopes for Streetscape had been to open up the sidewalk, both by widening it physically and with the removal of the utility poles as impediments for pedestrians. A narrower sidewalk was not one of the anticipated results and was not considered an option by the council on Monday.
The minor loss of prime parking, while seized upon by Boesch as a preferred option among the four elements to be balanced, was a major objection to the 2005 concept from the town’s business community and thus the requirement for no loss of existing parallel parking had been included in JMT’s constraints.
The business community had also opposed a move to a single travel lane in each direction, saying the two lanes help bring more customers to their shops and restaurants. And council members said they also feared traffic impacts extending beyond Route 1 if only one lane was available.
Council Member J. Robert “Bob” Parsons put his focus on the bicycle lane on Monday. Could the town do without it and instead incorporate cyclists into vehicular traffic lanes?
“The responses showed overwhelming support for keeping the bike lane,” Graviet said, citing about 90 of 100 responses received by the town on the issue.
Boesch noted that a previous — since rejected — concept plan had styled the vehicular travel lanes more as a parking lot, with additional care to be paid by drivers to other motorists, to cyclists and to pedestrians — making more reasonable the loss of a bicycle lane and cyclists blending in with traffic.
Pole removal option still costly for town
Stymied by the need to balance the various desired elements of their revamped downtown, council members instead focused on Graviet’s recommendation to simply remove utility poles to the alleys.
But there, too, the town has had its share of bad news. Town officials were previously told by a DelDOT engineer that the poles were on DelDOT’s property and posed a safety concern, and that the state could therefore be asked to pay for their removal to the alley. But the town has since been told simply that DelDOT would not pay for the move or otherwise assist the town with the associated costs, Graviet said.
“The town will have to bear that cost,” he said. “I’ve asked.”
That has led the town to seek cost estimates for such a move from Delmarva Power and Light (DPL), which owns the poles and would do the relocation work, and from Verizon, whose telephone transmission lines are also strung from the poles.
DPL provided an estimate of $500,000 to the town, while Verizon officials said that even an estimate of the cost would require $12,000 to $13,000 to be paid by the town to Verizon. Further, Graviet said, Verizon had looked only at the removal of the poles from the 100 and beach blocks of Garfield Parkway and not the 200 block, where some have argued the poles are even more of an eyesore.
“They’re treating it like we’re asking them to move the Great Pyramid,” he said, reporting Verizon didn’t want to even consider the change in the 200 block because major lines feeding the town’s telephone system to the north and south are placed there and would require far more work to relocate than the “feeder” lines present in the 100 block.
Neither option came with an actual cost estimate from the telephone company, Graviet said, only the statement of how much such an estimate would cost the town.
Only minimal costs are expected from Mediacom for any needed relocation of cable television lines.
Council appears ready to move ahead
Graviet said he believed the next move for the town should be to secure hard numbers for those cost estimates. Council members agreed on Jan. 14, asking him to obtain cost estimates from all the associated utilities for moving the poles in both the smaller 100 block and eastward area, and along the street from Route 1 to the boardwalk.
“We can’t move further without hard numbers on the utility relocation,” Council Member Tracy Mulligan said.
Mulligan added that he’d like council members to consider which one of the four elements of a full Streetscape plan they could live without if the town was to decide to move ahead with a larger-scale plan instead of just the moving of the utility poles.
“One of the four has to go,” he said, noting that JMT had done away with the bike lane in its concept plan.
“Whenever the ADA requirements kick in in the future, we would have to make that decision,” Mulligan said. Graviet said any major restructuring of the sidewalks in the area would trigger those requirements, while removing the poles and patching the sidewalks afterward would not.
“Parking versus bikes would seem to be the central choice,” Mulligan added.
Graviet could present the cost estimates for the moving of the utility poles as soon as the council’s February meeting. Council Member Jerry Dorfman asked him outright to make sure that any costs for such an estimate, such as those suggested by Verizon, be included in the town’s budget for the 2009 fiscal year, which begins in April.
A decision to move forward on a Streetscape plan could also potentially call for another public hearing on the issue, since the public has generally been consulted on all the major steps in previous considerations of the project. But the council appeared to be of the consensus this week that the time has come to move forward on at least some aspect of a streetfront beautification plan for Garfield Parkway.
“This has been on the table for too long,” said Mayor Carol Olmstead, “and the time has come to do something, even if it’s just moving the poles.”
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