TOLEDO, Ohio — 11 Investigates received a tip from our phone bank about a street in south Toledo that has been crumbling for years.
After visiting Jervis Street, our crews could see why neighbors called.
'I've lived on this street alone for 10 years," resident Michael Roberts said.
The Ohio Department of Transportation started work on I-75 near Jervis Street in 2020. Multiple neighbors, including Roberts, feel entities like ODOT are to blame.
"Once ODOT started coming down here, doing the expressway with their big trucks they'd go sit down at the turnaround and eat their lunch and come back down and sit in the turnaround and the road has just got progressively worse," Roberts said.
11 Investigates reached out to ODOT officials about the concerns. ODOT District 1 public information officer Rhonda Pees sent back the following information:
- "Before a project begins, we work with the local entities – in this case, the city of Toledo – to designate haul routes. These are local roads that will carry the construction traffic created by the project. Their condition is documented so we may return them to at least that same condition or better at the conclusion of a project.
- We began work near Jervis Street in 2020, but Jervis was not designated as a haul route for the ODOT I-75 projects. While Jervis is very close to multiple major work areas, Jervis Street would not have received regular heavy truck traffic, at least not from the ODOT I-75 projects. Any needed repairs to Jervis Street would be the responsibility of the city of Toledo or perhaps Lucas County.
- Eastern and Western Avenue between Broadway and I-75 were designated as local haul routes for the I-75 projects and were reconstructed as part of an agreement with the city of Toledo."
Roberts thinks the road needs to be resurfaced.
Jervis Street is on the road construction list Toledo crews want to tackle in 2023, but it begins at Maumee Avenue and ends at Broadway Street, which is not the portion of the street Roberts' neighborhood is in.
"They don't do nothing on this side of the expressway, we don't see the city down here," Robert said.
A few potholes that were patched by city crews are slowly crumbling away.
"The city has been telling us for years they're going to come down and fix it and redo it but nothing," Roberts said.
WTOL 11 reached out to the city to ask why the section of Jervis Street that Roberts lives on is not being fixed, city clerk specialist Bridget Ridley provided the following statement:
"We consider a number of factors when selecting roads including road condition, proximity to schools and churches, combining nearby road projects, and coordination with other work that has to be completed on the street (such as a new waterline). We also try to split the available budget 50/50 between reconstruction and resurfacing.
Reconstructions are necessary for the roads in the worst condition. We have a rating system we use to determine the condition of each road and we start at the bottom of the list to select roads for reconstruction. Reconstructions are also costly — at $2.4 million per mile, we are limited in the number of full reconstructions we can do each year.
At the same time, we want to prevent roads from getting to this point. Roads that fall in the middle of our rating system are selected for resurfacing, which is a far more affordable treatment that can extend the life of the road. At $550,000 per mile, we can do many more resurfacings each year at the same cost and save the city money long term.
The reality is many streets in Toledo are in poor shape. We are chipping away at the worst of the worst while trying to maintain the others. We always appreciate resident feedback on which roads they would like to see reconstructed/resurfaced and if we could do them all now, we would. We appreciate their patience as we work our way through the list.
More information is available on our website at toledo.oh.gov/roads."