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How do you reconstruct a busy roadway, alongside a lake, skirted by an historic housing district, and incorporate measures into the road design to handle stormwater runoff and protect water quality? You hold meetings with everyone involved for one thing...which is what the county engineer and SRF consulting engineers were doing last week.

The plan for rebuilding County Road 9 through Center City was discussed again at a public meeting in the Center City church basement. The county hopes to work with Center City on a 2011 project redoing the roadway from the post office/mall to the curve into the Government Center access street.

Attendees were asked to fill out a survey on aspects of the design offered so far, which haven't changed much from the open house drawings and design information released a year ago.

There were cutaway posters displayed at last week's meeting showing the new retaining wall(s) proposed to abut the road on the edge of front yards of homes. The choice is apparently a one tier or two-tier wall design.

Delia Jurek, member of Center City's Historic Preservation Commission, told those gathered that Summit Avenue or County Road 9, "Isn't your regular road...it is important to the state as a historic district and to the nation (placed on Historic Register in 1980.)" She added the HPS is glad that a "standard approach" is not being taken on this project and that the county has been willing to meet with property owners and city officials.

It was explained that in the new layout traffic lanes have been approved by the state to be as narrow as possible-- 11 feet. This will help leave space for a "landing area" of about four feet wide on the lake edge of the road. At this time there's a wire-strand guardrail and the blufftop drops right off.

There will be "dynamic speed signs" which are the regular rectangle shaped speed limit signs that include a lighted readout of the passing vehicle's speed.

Utilities that cross over the county road will be buried.

Because many historic district yards will drop-off at a new retaining wall cut-- there is a "crosswalk" planned at Mobeck Avenue for people to access lakefront. Various rock and timber steps, handrails, address posts will be removed from the right-of-way.

Joe Triplett, county engineer, said one piece of news is that soil borings revealed much higher quality base soils beneath the road than was thought.

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