Toledo rips up road for ditch just weeks after chip-sealing job

Crews work on Violet Road on Thursday. The city spent $5,500 to chip seal the road this summer, now torn up for a ditch project.

The city of Toledo spent more than $5,500 to chip-seal a West Toledo street this summer, only to tear it up less than a month later when a ditch-improvement project started in the area.

Jen Sorgenfrei, a spokesman for Mayor Mike Bell, said the city official who drafted a list of streets to be chip-sealed this summer checked for conflicting projects, but did not realize the work to improve Barnum Ditch was an issue.

“They did not associate Barnum Ditch with Violet Road,” she said.

Property owners along streets that are chip-sealed typically are assessed for the repair, but the $5,534 city expense for the Violet Road treatment applied in August won’t be assessed, Ms. Sorgenfrei said.

The street last had been chip-sealed in 2008, with assessments for that placed on 2010 tax bills.

On the plus side, she said, Violet will be repaved with asphalt once the ditch project is finished — marking the end of chip-sealing and related assessments on that street.

“They’re going to leave it better than it was before,” she said, “but we have to own that one [the chip-sealing error].”

Crestline Paving holds the $813,000 contract for the Barnum project, which includes widening a ditch west of Mercy St. Anne Hospital plus enlarging and rerouting an underground storm sewer.

Construction is scheduled to take about six months.