Trustee Meroni
Monday evening, during the Village Board meeting, Trustee Messer shocked many, but none more than Roads & Bridges Trustee Patty Meroni, when he stated our roads “suck.” That’s rather pejorative considering Messer was Meroni’s running mate in 2011 and she is now running for reelection. Nonetheless, she does need to answer why our roads are in such decrepit condition.
A brief review of the background of this issue is in order.
In 2005, the Village Board established a plan to maintain Village roads every ten years based on a rotating schedule of resurfacing. This meant resurfacing approximately 3.2 miles of roadways per year to achieve that goal. This road maintenance goal was cited as a reason for multiple tax levy increases.
However, it was recently revealed that just four years later in 2009, the plan was in the hole (or pothole as it were), by 3.26 miles of backlogged road improvements.
Why? Because the levy increases were not earmarked for roads, and millions of dollars were squandered in legal fees for ill-advised litigation from 2005 through 2013. We’ve covered that road before in a recent editorial, so we needn’t travel it again now.
What’s concerning to us is ever since Gewalt Hamilton reported last year that we were nearly 5 miles behind in road maintenance, they also reported a significant percentage of roadways that are either in poor or very poor condition. Why didn’t they report the deficit in road resurfacing back in 2009?
Think about who was in office at the time, and you’ll find the answer.
More concerning is we’ve paid Gewalt Hamilton millions of dollars since 2005, and over $400,000 last year alone and for what?
Since last year’s telling report, Meroni has obfuscated the real roadway issues by bringing up the Cuba Road bridge project and the unanticipated expensive patching of Healy Road.
The Cuba Road bridge replacement has been in the works since before her term in office. It’s no surprise to anyone.
The decimation of Healy Rd could easily have been prevented had Meroni lowered the weight limit on it when Penny Rd was being resurfaced. Why didn’t she or Gewalt Hamilton realize dozens of fully loaded gravel trucks used Healy to bypass Penny Rd lane closures daily for months? Our local roads are not engineered for that amount of stress.
Aside from her repeated smokescreens about such projects, Meroni seems unphased by the significant investments it will require to fix our roads in the next few years and the prospect of higher taxes to do so. As a matter of fact, at the last Monday’s Board meeting, she said that she believes residents are willing to pay more in taxes.
Perhaps she should run that by Cook County residents who will be writing checks this weekend to pay their first installments of property taxes due on Tuesday. We doubt they would agree with her, and they’d likely tell her the prospect of higher taxes “sucks.”
– The Observer