Eutaw discusses road and paving issues
Published 12:00 am Thursday, October 13, 2005
EUTAW-The City of Eutaw discussed the paving, lining and parking of trucks on their city streets at their Tuesday meeting. Paving and lining roads have presented problems and dangers around the city and Eutaw Mayor Raymond Steele said he would like to see the situation taken care of.
Steele said several roads were in the process of being paved around the city, but here were still some loose ends to tie.
“Paving is well on the way for the city,” Steele said. “A lot of work has been done, but there is still a lot of work to be done.”
Steele said there were roads around town that needed to be striped as well as the newly paved roads. He said he would like to talk to someone about getting this done.
“I wanted to talk to a company about doing that,” Steele said. “I think if we can get that done for less than $5,000 we will have enough funding. If we say less than $5,000 we can also do this without bidding it out.”
Steele said roads such as Wilson Avenue were in need of striping because their current lines were difficult to see at night. The council voted unanimously to allow Steele to pursue workers for the project.
The second issue regarding city streets involved the parking of large trucks. Steele said the city had an ordinance in place to prevent this and planned to enforce it.
“The ordinance states that trucks should stay on the truck route,” Steele said. “The route we have talked about is Highway 14, 43, and 11. That is the truck route and any time you come off that you are on city streets and that is a violation of the ordinance.”
City attorney Mike Smith said trucks could leave these streets and park in the event they were making a delivery, but prolonged parking was prohibited.
“Trucks that are making direct deliveries to and from a business can leave the truck route and travel the shortest distance to the place they are making their deliveries,” Smith said. “They can’t come and just park their truck overnight.”
Councilmember Darlene Robinson said she would like to see the ordinance enforced fully when it was put into practice.
“One of the things I would like to see is when we start going to these peoples houses if we ask one person to move their truck, we should ask every truck in the city to be moved out,” Robinson said. “We got a call in a community about a truck being there and all we could do was tell them what we thought was right. We need to have all trucks moved if we are going to have one moved.”
Robinson also said she would like to see a more positive attitude toward the enforcement of the ordinance.
“I think if we are going to tell people where they can’t park their truck we need to give them options,” Robinson said. “We need to tell them in the city or out of the city where they can park their truck. We tell them they can’t park their trucks here, but we don’t give them an option or tell them how we are going to help them. We need to give them options.”