Omaha Paying Half of Cost to Fix Residential Street

The city of Omaha, Neb., will pay half of the cost to resurface a street that contains the home of a man who sued the city over its streets policy earlier this year.

The City Council voted unanimously to approve using $86,000 to cover the cost of resurfacing a one-block stretch of Loveland Drive, the Omaha World-Herald reported.

Public Works Director Bob Stubbe says the work has already been completed.

The street is part of an estimated 300 lane-miles of streets that weren’t built to city code and are pitted with potholes. The city eventually stops maintaining residential streets that weren’t built to code when they become too worn down.

The neighbors can choose to keep the street as it is or pay to repave or upgrade it.

The part of the repaired Loveland Drive includes the home of Bruce Simon, who previously sued the city over its streets policy. Simon dropped the suit after Mayor Jean Stothert announced a group of measures intended to address the problem, including a fund set aside each year to pay for residential streets.

Loveland Drive is the fifth area where the city has agreed to waive a policy requiring neighbors to pay the entire amount of upgrades or resurfacing.

The bad roads have been both an anomaly and a source of complaints for years. But recently, they’ve become the center of a mini-crisis after local officials began dispatching crews to tear up the asphalt in the neighborhoods and turn the streets back into dirt roads, much like what existed in the city’s frontier days.

Related:

• Omaha Answers Pothole Complaints with New Dirt Roads